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8 ROBERT LOUI

STEVENSON'5
EDINBURGH D^

. BLATSLTYRE SIMPS

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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S
EDINBURGH DAYS

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S
EDINBURGH DAYS : BY

E. BLANTYRE SIMPSON

ILLUSTRATED

HODDER & STOUGHTON

LONDON

MCM

XIV

ALISON CUNNINGHAM

CHAPTER VI

301483

FAGB

3

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE ....

CHAPTER U

THOMAS STEVENSON . . . » * • ^5

CHAPTER Hi

MRS. STEVENSON 5^

CHAPTER IV

77

CHAPTER V

INFANT DAYS '°5

SCHOOLDAYS

T

125

vi CONTEXTS

CHAPTER VII

PAGB

SPRING EQUINOX I4S

CHAPTER VIII

LEARNING TO WRITE 177

CHAPTER IX

LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING .... I99

CHAPTER X
LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE 229

CHAPTER XI

TRAVEL SONGS 26 I

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S
EDINBURGH DAYS

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE

■The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotsman.'

— Silverado Squatters.

' Here a boy he dwelt, through all the singing season,
And ere the day of sorrow departed as he came.'

— Underwoods,

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE

Robert Louis Stevenson, speaking of the in-
significant river which has car\'ed for itself a
gorge through the west end of Edinburgh, credits
this murky Water of Leith with making music
in his memory. Within a bowshot of it he first
saw the Hght on November 13th, 1850.

His birthplace, 8 Howard Place, is in an
unpretentious street, then one of the northern-
most outskirts of Edinburgh. In the middle of
the century there were, on this road to the
Forth, old country^ houses, whose ample parks
and pleasaunces made verdant spots amid the
grey encroaching town. Facing Louis's first
home, black against the sk\'-line, stands the
shaggv' ridge of Corstorphine Hill. On that hill-
side he made Alan Breck and David Balfour part
company awhile, to meet again at Silvermills not
far from his birthplace. Buildings have shut out
this westerly outlook, and now Howard Place is
hemmed in on all sides, though the gimp gardens

3

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

in front of its two-storied modest houses, as well
as the big laburnums and plenteous lilacs, tell by
their free growth of greater space and air in more
rustic days.

Louis's home for the first seven winters of his
life was in that neighbourhood, and he had
a plentiful supply of such flowers and sunshine
as Edinburgh is endowed with, and breezes with
a whiff of the sea in them. Louis had an ever-
green freshness of memory. Cheerful recollec-
tions of his hopeful, happy childhood were
stamped indelibly on his mind.

His first nurse was a widow, who in after
years read his books with great pride, though
she had not seen him since she left him a helpless
baby. She had a fancy for tales of a blood-
curdHng description, and took special interest
in her foster-son's most gruesome stories, flatter-
ing herself he had imbibed the appetite for such
from her.

In the dawn of his days she took him for his
first taste of the outer air into the Botanic Gar-
dens, which are nearly opposite his birthplace.
Lying full to the sun, with sheltered paths, fenced
by walls and trees from the nipping sweep of
easterly winds, it was an inviting parade-ground
for nurses and their tender charges. Louis, in

4

EDINBURGH DAYS

his Child Flay, as if he had not forgotten these
immature days, speaks of the lazy interest which
children, wheeled along in perambulators and half
sunk in a species of pleasing stupor, evince in
their surroundings.

We can conjure up the image of the future
author at this stage, in a hat bulky with pro-
tective ear-bows, absurdly chubby of cheek, with
his dark eyes alertly noting the things of colour
and life within his range, or contemplating other
juveniles with placid condescension, as in this
wordless state of existence they passed one
another by with exchange of infantine smiles.
He also studied the world from the windows of
his home. The students of botany, hurrying in
the May mornings to their lecture among the
flowers, might often have seen a small child held
up to the window to gaze at the lads, who were
almost as early astir as the dust-carts.

When Louis was beginning to toddle on his
unstable legs and to talk in a language only his
parents understood, he had the good fortune to
have Alison Cunningham engaged as his nurse.
From the lucky day she crossed his path, he
may be said to have had two mothers. The
task of guarding his health and harbouring his
feeble strength gave ample work to a couple of

5

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

capable women. Robert Louis Stevenson was
not like many eventually successful Scots, who
have had to fight their way upward from a
lowly rung on the ladder. He was born with
the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. An
only son, a treasured child, he had before him
substantial worldly prospects. He was reared
in a home where he w^as lapped in love. A
poor lad has often at least one advantage over
a rich one, for in the narrow sphere of a cottage
he tastes life nearest the bone, where it is sweet-
est, and has the full benefit of his mother's
watchful guardianship without any intervening
nursery. But young Louis, when social duties
kept Mrs. Stevenson from him, ever had his
* second mother ' at his beck and call.

When he grew big enough to make daily walks
abroad, a neighbour recollects watching him as
he was led along on the sunniest side of the
pavement, firmly gripping nurse's hand, his face
flanked with flannel, for he suffered continually
from earache.

A tender little plant he looked, despite the
plumpness of babyhood which still rounded his
cheeks. His daily walks did not extend very
far. He often peered through the gates of
Warriston, looking up at the square house stand-

6

EDINBURGH DAYS

ing pleasantly in its beech-fringed park. WTien
he grew old enough to digest grisly tales, he
learned how an Edinburgh tragedy had been
enacted there : how a wife hired a man to beat
her husband to death, and how she walked up
and down the long corridor looking out on the
silver-stemmed beeches till the cries of the
wretched man were stilled.

A pond in the Botanic Gardens, with a verdant
knoll rising out of it, was another pet place of
young Louis's ; water and even a make-believe
island were early attractive to him. Adventur-
ous daisies pied the old turf there before their
due season, and the boy, ever fond of flowers,
used to pick these stunted pioneers, and with
the painfully short-stemmed posy, limp with
being pressed in his hot hands, he would hurry
home to his mother. ' Cummy ' had to lift him
up in her long-suffering arms every time they
crossed Canonmills Bridge, to look over the
parapet and watch the Water of Leith as it
swirled down in winter, a turbulent flood over-
flowing its channel, and hiding the grass under
its darkling, frothy waters. * Often and often I
desire to look upon it again,' he says, — ^not from
this bridge, perhaps, but from a point some miles
further inland, where it ran, speckled with mill

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

foam, past his grandfather's manse. Beside this
drumlie river at Canonmills Bridge, there was
to be seen a garden, which flourished under the
lee of the protecting parapet. It was a reminder
of country days, a garden with strawberr>^ plots
edged by a border of old-fashioned flowers, and
apple and pear trees blooming early in the
hollow. Young Louis could watch the first hints
of spring from his outlook on the bridge. When
he was at Samoa, it is recorded of him that
* his eyes were never at rest, nothing escaped
his notice — birds, flowers, or the tiny snow-white
clouds hanging high in the blue empyrean.* So
when but a toddling bairn, holding to Cummy's
hand for support and guidance, his quick eyes
noted everything around him.

Louis Stevenson acquired, almost in infancy, a
fancy for mills, and close by his first Edinburgh
home stood some red-roofed, grey- walled mills,
where, some eight hundred years before, corn had
been ground for the canons of Holy rood. The
mill lades have long since been buried and turned
into town drains, and the quaint cottages with
the outside stairs that gathered around the
ancient mills with the red roofs will not see a
new century.

The history of his native town was of interest

8

EDINBURGH DAYS

to this slim son of hers even when he was small.
His kith and kin for generations had been
citizens of Auld Reekie. His grandsire's people
had dwelt within its old walls. His mother's
connections, the Balfours, owned Pilrig, on the
main road that stretched from the city of his
childhood to the sea. Pilrig House stood then
in its pleasaunce, and Leith Walk was a country
road. Louis speaks of his grandfather racing
up the green avenue to Pilrig House, and as a
student marching up the Bridges ' in trim
stockinged legs in that city of cocked hats and
good Scotch still unadulterated.' Louis sent his
hero, David, to Pilrig to see his cousin, the
Laird, so he was related to his own creation.
David Balfour saw Pilrig House much as Robert
Louis Stevenson's grandfather, Lewis Balfour,
knew it in his young days, when corpses creaked
in chains on the Gallows Lee, between Pilrig and
Edinburgh.

It was at this grandfather's manse at Colinton
that Louis first learned, he says, to love mills.
' Had I an ancestor a miller ? * he asks, to ac-
count for this early developed taste, and he finds
a Stevenson who was a lessee of the Canonmills.
A Bailie Stevenson, w^ho lived at the time of
the Restoration, and * the miller of Canonmills,

9

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

worthy man ! ' were, he feared, really debarred
from his pedigree, and he complains, ' I am re-
duced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters.'
Whence through the trail of heredity he drew
some of his special gifts it is not hard to trace,
for he came of a shrewd and cultivated stock.
But his peculiarities in manner and appearance
cannot be accounted for by his forbears. He
has taken us with him in a Stevensonian genea-
logical hunt, a hunt pursued at intervals of
several years, which he ultimately wove into the
Records of a Family of Engineers, He came to
the conclusion that ' on the whole the Stevensons
may be described as decent, reputable folk,
following honest trades— millers, maltsters, and
doctors — playing the character parts in the
Waverley Novels with propriety if without dis-
tinction, and to an orphan looking about him
in the world for a potential ancestry offering a
plain and quite unadorned refuge equally free
from shame and glory.*

His direct paternal kinsmen, who bore succes-
sively the name of Robert, sprang, in 1675, from
one James Stevenson, of Nether Carsewell, malt-
ster, in the then clean and handsome city on the
Clyde. Louis's grandfather was the third Robert

in this Hne. He had been early left an orphan,
10

EDINBURGH DAYS

his young father, Alan Stevenson, and Alan's
brother, Hugh, having died in the West Indies,
whither they had gone in pursuit of an unjust
steward. Alan's widow married a second time,
a widower, Thomas Smith, who carried on a
trade in oil, and brought into the Stevenson
blood a love of lamps, a love a future Stevenson
who * stayed at home and played with paper like
a child ' fully inherited. * I will say it fairly,'
he writes, ' it grows on me with ever>' year ;
there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street
lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my
right ha7id forget its cunnijig'

Thomas Smith, who was an enterprising man,
began to trade with the Northern Lights Com-
missioners, and he brought to their notice the
advantages of oil lamps and reflectors as com-
pared with the open fires of coals. He had a
daughter by his previous marriage. His step-
son, young Robert Stevenson, fixed on this semi-
sister as his helpmeet, and found in her a piously
inclined douce wife. From among the many
children she bore him but three of the sons sur-
vived, the future builders of harbours and those
great pharoses which form round our coasts a
chain of brilliant, helpful Northern Lights.

There can be no doubt whence Louis imbibed

IZ

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

his love of adventure and of the sea. Ships bulk
largely in Tusitala's tales. A ship very appro-
priately appeared on his monument at San Fran-
cisco, a fine old-world galley of the build those
Vikings used in their sea-raidings. There hung
in the house of Louis's boyish great-grandfather,
Alan Stevenson, ' and,' he savs, * successively in
those of my grandfather and father, an oil paint-
ing of a ship of many tons burthen. The pic-
ture was preserved through years of hardship,
and remains to this day in the possession of the
family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire
Alan. It was on this ship that he sailed on his
last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by
Hugh.' In his Memories Louis relates how a
frigate in a window took his eye, and ' when upon
any Saturday we made a party to behold the
ships we passed that corner, and since in those
days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy
or daybreak, this of itself was enough to hallow
it.'

If engineering in 1870 had been as much on
the rough as it was some eighty years before,
Thomas Stevenson would not have had any diffi-
culty in persuading his son to follow in the foot-
steps of his sires. Louis, speaking sympatheti-
cally, yet enviously, of the difficulties and dangers

12

EDINBURGH DAYS

his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, had to face
when trying to Hght our dark coasts, says : * It
must not be forgotten that these voyages in the
tender were the particular pleasure and reward
of his existence ; that he had in him a reserve of
romance which carried him delightedly over these
hardships and perils, that to him it was " a great
gain " to be eight nights and seven days in the
savage Bay of Levensurck — to read a book in
the much -agitated cabin, to go on deck and hear
the gale scream in his ears and see the land-
scape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her
two anchors, and to turn in at night and wake
again at morning in his narrow berth to the
clamorous and continued voices of the gale.*
This near relative bequeathed some of his char-
acteristics with a bountiful plenitude to his
descendant, for from him Louis inherited his
' anxious exactitude about details, an interesting
flow of conversation, a taste for sea and adven-
ture, and lastly that reserve of romance.' Louis,
remarking on his grandfather's letters to his
small sons, says that besides all these he had ' a
fine scent of all that was romantic to a boy.'

From his mother's side Louis, like David
Balfour, came of the Balfours of Pilrig. His
grandfather was what he called ' a herd of men.'

13

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

In Memories and Portraits he gives us a well-
executed sketch of Mrs. Stevenson's old home,
and of her father, the Rev. Lewis Balfour, in his
manse at Colinton. The minister we see grey of
locks, handsome of feature, upright of carriage,
smacking his Hps over a * barley-sugar kiss,' a
sweetmeat administered to Louis as a reward
after a dose of medicine. Louis's last recollec-
tion of his grandfather was of an old gentleman
sternly forbidding his daughter. Miss Balfour,
to give a lollipop to her expectant nephew, for
the boy had had no horrid gregory to swallow.
From the Balfours the author took his name,
except the Robert, which came to him from the
Stevensons. His mother disliked the names
Thomas and Robert, and wished the latter
excluded. Mr. Stevenson, however, had the
old-fashioned belief in a grandson bearing the
name of his father's father, though he said he
might drop it for everyday use. He promised
his wife her boy would be spoken of as Lewis,
unless she had another son, when, according to
hereditary rule, she had the naming of him after
her father. Robert Lewis Balfour our hero was
baptized. Perhaps he thought there was a
superabundance of letters in R. L. B. S. The
Balfour soon dropped out of his name, and early
14

EDINBURGH DAYS

he became R. L. S., which initials, says Mr.
Barrie, ' are, I suppose, the best beloved in recent
literature ; certainly they are the sweetest to

me.'

He also, like his grandsire, started in life with
his name spelt Lewis. The stor>^ of the change
to Louis is remarkable. Mr. Stevenson was a
strong Conser\'ative. Now in Robert Louis
Stevenson's youthful years there was a Radical
town councillor yclept Lewis. So strong was
Mr. Stevenson's aversion to the man that he
ordered that in future his son's name should be
spelt differently, even with a Frenchified turn in
it, for fear the two families should be thought
in any way connected. So the boy's patronymic
was in a manner severed from the minister of
Colinton, and his mother often regretted he had
dropped her father's honoured surname. Young
Robert Louis owns that he felt he had little in
common with the Rev. Dr. Lewis Balfour.
' Now,' he writes, ' I often wonder what I in-
herited from this old minister. Try as I please,
I cannot join myself on with the reverend doctor ;
and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write
the phrase, he moves in my blood and whispers
words to me, and sits efficient in the ver>^ knot

and centre of my being.'

15

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Louis's mother was born in the old manse of
Colinton. ' A large family,' her boy says, ' of
stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and
reared, and came to man and womanhood in that
nest of little chambers, so that the face of the
earth was peppered with the children of the
manse, and letters with outlandish stamps became
familiar to the local postman. The dullest could
see this was a house that had a pair of hands in
divers foreign places.' Though Balfours wan-
dered afar over the globe, it was not so much
love of travel as the Scot's destiny which impelled
them to leave the crowded homeland and cross
the seas in search of work. The commanding
presence of the silvery-headed divine who shep-
herded his human flocks at Colinton filled the
eye and duly impressed his small namesake.
Louis regretted no share of the Balfour fine looks
had come his way. The children of the old
manse were a blue-eyed race, shapely in feature
and noble in carriage. In 1863 Louis, in Random
Memories^ mentions that at Leven there was still
to be seen * the tall figure and white locks of the
last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle. Dr. Balfour,
who was still walking his hospital rounds, while
the troopers from Meerut clattered and cried
** Deen Deen " along the streets of the imperial

j6

EDINBURGH DAYS

city.* Another Dr. Balfour, whom Louis calls
' that wise youth, my uncle,* testifies in Edin-
burgh to-day that the Balfours are a strikingly
good-looking race. Louis's mother was a slim,
active woman, and no one seeing her in her
latter years, with her erect figure and fresh face,
would have believed her the mother of a son
who had died aged forty-five. Mrs. Stevenson
was a cultured and clever woman. Luckily Louis
inherited her bright, vivacious disposition ; but
he tells us the Balfours were unemotional,
hating the display of what they felt. Their
descendant was the reverse of this, and his
original unconventionality, his tropical tempera-
ment, and his foreign appearance, cannot be
traced to any of his progenitors. Louis wrote
most likely with a twinkle of fun lighting up
his Southern sunny eyes. * To one more tradi-
tion I may allude, that we are somehow descended
from a French barber-surgeon who came to St.
Andrews in the ser\dce of one of the Cardinal
Beatons. No details were added. But the
very name of France was so detested in my
family for three generations that I am tempted
to suppose there may be something in it.'

There was another Stevenson, one of Louis's
cousins, who seemed to have a strong dash of

B 17

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Bohemlanism, though he too came of the same
orderly family of engineers. There can be no
doubt that it was from some Stevenson that they
acquired alien blood, for two of his descendants
rebelled against the prim decorum of the accepted
codes of social life, and both refused a lucrative
and hereditary seat in the office their sires had
made, preferring the more precarious earnings by
pen and brush. The fact that the two bore the
same grandfather's name, and were in many
things so alike, make it clear that this gipsy
strain came from the father's side, though as
far back as the author of A Family of Engineers
(feeling, he says, as if he had his ancestors'
souls in his charge all the while) could fathom,
the Stevensons, and the wives they married,
were an industrious, thrifty set of quiet-going,
reputable folk.

In a delightful genealogical glimpse, Louis,
when wandering over * our ancestral adventures
which are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy,'
to account for perv^erse caprices, harks back to
' tree-top memories like undeveloped negatives '
lying dormant in his mind. ' And though, to-
day, I am only a man of letters,' he goes on to
say, ' either tradition errs, or I was present when
there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-

i8

EDINBURGH DAYS

surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the
great Cardinal Beaton. I have shaken a spear in
the Debateable Land, and shouted the slogan of
the Elliots. I was present when a skipper, ply-
ing from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France
after the '15. I was in a West India merchant's
office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol Jarvie,
and managed the business of a plantation in St.
Kitts. I was with my engineer-grandfather (the
son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he
sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise
that gave us The PiraU and The Lord of the Isles ;
I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock in the fog,
when the Smeaton drifted from her moorings,
and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized
upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap
sea-water before his tongue could utter audible
words ; and once more with him when the Bell
Rock beacon took a " thrawe " and his workmen
fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he
sat unmoved reading in his Bible — or affecting to
read — till one after another slunk back with con-
fusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes,
parts of me have seen life, and met adventures,
and sometimes met them well' This descendant
of these men, although wanting in physical
strength, certainly was endowed with their en-

19

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

durance and their pluck. Though frail of body,
he enjoyed in a manner a robustness of consti-
tution few have equalled, for he found * true
health is to be able to do without it.* He was
denied strong lungs and limbs, and any palpable
immunity from sickness, yet he had a full measure
of lusty vigour, for he faced the ills of the flesh so
gallantly that, according to his own argument, he
was a Samson in strength.

We have seen whence he gleaned his mettle-
some bravery, but we know not which of the
many threads and fibres of his being can account
for his unique, unnational look, for never could
he persuade an official he was a Briton, much
less a Scotsman. He was, he complained, cast
into dungeons as a spy, arrested as a vagrant
pedlar, and looked at askance when he went to
cash cheques at strange banks, and his pass-
port was ever most suspiciously scrutinized. It
is curious, too, that the descendant of the gentle-
blooded Balfours and the even-going Stevensons
had such * gangrel feet,' which made him long to
wander like any genuine gipsy. His whole being
yearned for brilliance of colouring and the sun-
shiny heat of the South. ' There is one of
nature's spiritual ditties,' he early wrote, * that
has not yet been set to words or human music,

EDINBURGH DAYS

** The Invitation to the Road," an air continually
sounding in the ears of gipsies, and to whose
inspiration our nomadic fathers journeyed all
their days.'

Louis was not given a musical ear along with
his poetic endowments, but this spiritual song he
could always appreciate, and he would not have
changed ears with those who cannot hear its
music. ' What sleeper in green tree-tops, what
muncher of nuts concludes my pedigree ? * Robert
Louis Stevenson asks anxiously. It seems to us
some long dormant ' tree-top instinct ' awoke in
him and sent him away from us to settle amid
the gaudy, luxuriant richness of a South Sea isle.
Some unrecorded progenitor must have listened
to that nomadic spiritual ditty which gipsies
hear so readily and sing so invitingly, leading
others with them along the free and open road.
For Louis undisguisedly delighted to escape out
of what he called the Bastille of civilization, and
become * a mere kindly animal and a sheep of
nature's flock,' even though on his travels he
found ' the globe, granite underfoot and strewn
with cutting flints.'

THOMAS STEVENSON

23

'The life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains ; what we have
lost, what we now try to recall, is the friend and companion.'—
Memories and Portraits.

CHAPTER II

THOMAS STEVENSON

Though his pedigree does not shed much light
on the origin of Louis's Southern looks, his
responsive, mobile manners, his special gifts, we
have more authentic acquaintance with those
to whom he owed his existence, those who guided
and guarded him in his youth, and gave a training
bend to his thoughts when he was but a green
twig.

It vexed Mrs. Stevenson in her latter years to
hear or see it stated that Louis and his father
were antagonistic, and had waged a bitter civil
war. People, she said, assumed that types of
unhappy youths such as Archie Weir and
examples of rebellion against parental author-
ity were drawn from the author's own personal
experience. There was, it is true, a deal of
diversity between Thomas Stevenson's nature
and that of his only child, but underlying the
engineer's reserved decorum and sombreness
there were many points of resemblance and sym-
pathy between father and son. No one enjoyed

25

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Thomas Stevenson*s talk more than Louis, who
says it was ' compounded of so much sterUng
sense and so much freakish humour, and clothed
in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, that it
was a perpetual delight to all that knew him.
His use of language was both just and pictur-
esque. Love, anger, and indignation shone
through him and broke forth in imagery, like
what we read of in Southern races.' Louis
gloried in his father's whimsical fancies, his
* blended sternness and softness that was wholly
Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering ;
with a profound essential melancholy of dis-
position, and (what often accompanies it) the
most humorous geniality in company.' No one,
I think, appreciated his father's good qualities,
his humour, his quips and fads, even his dogged
theological views, more than the son who drew
so just and masterly a portrait of Thomas Steven-
son, Civil Engineer.

* Smout ' Mr. Stevenson rechristened his small
boy, a name he was long known by in his home
circle. Smout was simply worshipped by his two
mothers. On the brief days of winter, when his
mother and Cummy were partakers of a gorgeous
banquet, while he, the dispenser of the feast, sat

in a paper crown and presided over the mimic

26

EDINBURGH DAYS

tea-set (which still lives on Cummy's table), the

small boy, hearing the gate click, and his father's

key in the latch, would fly downstairs to greet the

master of the house and invite him to the ' party.*

No caressing and adoration that had been

lavished upon this sole monarch of the nursery

was half so appreciated by his majesty as the

kindly glance he saw beam on him from out of

his father's deep-set eyes, and the strong hand

held out to him, and the grave, interrogative

greeting, * Well, Smout ? ' The open-hearted,

manifestly affectionate boy quite understood

his apparently undemonstrative father ; and

though they bickered in words when the son

grew up, and argued and discussed with much

warmth, a good fellowship always existed between

them. Louis always warred in words with his

friends, and neither filial affection nor fear of his

father's displeasure ever rendered him dumb or

submissive. The two fought many a duel which,

to outsiders, seemed irreverent rebellion on the

son's part, but the father liked his boy's fearless

thruots. He could, truly, from his heart, dedicate

a volume ' in love and gratitude ' to the father

* by whose devices the great sea-lights in every

quarter of the world now shine more brightly.'

Mr. Stevenson came of a large family, of which

27

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

only five survived. They were mown down by
the harvester Death two or three at a time.
Thomas Stevenson's mother, her grandson says,
was * a devout, unambitious woman, occupied
with her Bible, her children, and her house ;
easily shocked, and associating largely with a
clique of godly parasites.' She seemed strongly
tinctured with narrow, pietistical morbidness,
and certainly two of her grandchildren — Robert
Alan and Robert Louis — did not derive their
puzzling peculiarities from her. Some of her
characteristics reappear in Mrs. Weir. * The
scene has often been described to me of my
grandfather sawing with darkened countenance
at some indissoluble joint, " Preserve me, my
dear, what kind of a reedy, stringy beast is
this ? " of the joint removed, the pudding
substituted and uncovered ; and of my grand-
mother's anxious glance and hasty deprecatory
comment, " Just mismanaged." The cook was
a godly woman, the butcher a Christian man,
and the table suffered.' Lord Hermiston's case
is almost parallel, Mrs. Weir having a household
of * Christian servants ' quite incompetent like
Mrs. Robert Stevenson's.

Thomas Stevenson, brought up by this bigot-
edly pious mother, who early became such a

28

EDINBURGH DAYS

* veteran in affliction,' had what her grandson
aptly describes as * a sense of humour under
strong control.' About him was an air of im-
perturbable gravity, but below his portentous
seriousness there often lurked a smile at the
corner of the firm-set mouth, and those who
knew him best, knew the staunch, warmly
affectionate nature of the man. He looked on
the sickly colour and the high brow of his small
Smout, and was oppressed by the fear that his
all-precious, only child would wither away, for
he remembered how his brothers and sisters,
though they had appeared to be rosy and strong,
never grew up. He came of a healthy family.
These were unsanitary times, and whooping
cough and measles were rife in their tightly
packed flat. Thomas Stevenson used to lull
himself to sleep with self-told tales which dealt
perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers,
old sailors, and commercial travellers before the
use of steam. They seem to us the foundation
of many stories we know. In one of his essays
Louis speaks of Scotch children hearing much
of * shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless
breakers, and great sea-lights ; much of heathery
mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters.'

There was certainly one Northern bairn who

29

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

heard much of these things as he sat on his
father's knee. This verbal record of the engin-
eers was full of a lively interest to young Louis.
He heard how French frigates threatened to
capture the engineer's ship ; how his father as
a boy, touring with his father, was all but
wrecked in a fog ; and how they once fired a
gun opposite a fishing village in order to rouse
up the inhabitants to their help, and roused
instead a camp of wreckers, who calmly waited
for them to drift on to the rocks. All the
history of these embryo days of engineering was
good to listen to, and little Louis pondered over
it and enacted some of the most exciting bits
anew in the nursery. He longed then to grow
up and go and light the mariner home, and warn
him of shoals by a newer Inchcape Bell, so —

* Whether fogs arise, and far and wide
The low sea level drown — each finds a tongue,
And all night long the bell resounds,
So shine, so toil, till night be overpast,
Till the stars vanish, till the sun return,
And in the haven rides the fleet secure.'

Mr. Stevenson not only gave his little Tusitala
a taste for adventurous tales, but his peculiar
theories on education were the theories which
best suited his son. To look at Thomas Steven-

EDINBURGH DAYS

son a hasty obsen^er would have thought he
had been one of those that uphold a rigid course
of study, and rigidly apply the tawse if need be.
But he himself in his learning time had been a
consistent idler, and he held he acquired more
by idHng than he did on the school bench. He
would stop schoolboys in the street, look at their
burden of books, shake his head over such trash,
and advise them with earnestness to pay no
heed to the rubbish which was being crammed
into them. He begged them to look about them,
play to their heart's content, but to read or study
only what their inclination dictated . The school-
boys would, open-mouthed, gaze at the firm-
faced man who seriously propounded such
palatable views. They keenly suspected he
was making fun of them, and went on their
way puzzled. He never ceased to expostulate
against the absurdity of education as conducted
at present in the seats of learning. Never by
his father was Louis asked how he stood in his
classes. Mr. Stevenson simply did not oppose
the boy's being sent to school.

One amusing episode of Robert Louis Steven-
son's schooldays and his father's manner of
teasing the boy comes down to us in one of
his minor pieces. * Robert's voice,' a master

31

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

had said, ' is not strong, but impressive/ * This
opinion,* Louis adds, * I was fool enough to carry
home to my father, who roasted me for years in
consequence.' If Louis, in some dispute or
childish excitement, raised his tone to a shrill
pitch, Mr. Stevenson would listen with inten-
tional gravity, and when Louis's treble was
silenced would turn to a visitor and remark,
' Louis is noted at school for his impressive
voice,' and would meditate on their stupidity
in not having been impressed thereby, till their
attention had been drawn towards the force of
that not strong voice. Meanwhile the boy,
smarting under the well-applied rebuke, would
in vain, with his tones getting shriller at every
word, protest against this oft-recurring sarcasm,
till, in a fit of impotent rage, he would fly to the
nursery to be praised and adored. All the
flattery mother and nurse lavished on him was
not as sweet to him as one word or glance of
approval from his father. When he was grown
up, Mr. Stevenson at times referred to this old
blister, and Louis, remembering the smart every
allusion to his impressive voice had given him
when in frocks, laughed at the remembrance.
Even in these after years, when the son had a
ready affluence of speech wherewith to argue
32

EDINBURGH DAYS

and defend himself against his father, Mr. Steven-
son, I think, still came off victorious. Louisas
talk was too wordy and spoken in unheeding
haste. It was like water sparkling on shallows.
He gesticulated the while impatiently. His
father sat immovable, and brought the heavy
artillery of his speech to bear with annihilating
force on the feu de joie and rapid cannonade of
words which flowed from his son's lips. In
fact, in peace or war, Mr. Stevenson was very
like the strong towers he built, devoid of all
elaborate flourishes, solid, reliable, able to meet
the strength of the attacking waves without
flinching, immovable as they splashed or fretted
or dashed around him.

A thorough man of business, inventing many
improvements for strengthening and perfecting
the revolving lights for the pharoses, acknow-
ledged at home and abroad as a distinguished
man in his profession, he had excellent taste and
discrimination in books, pictures, and engravings.
He was partial to sunflowers and antique furni-
ture. Long before they were revived as a
fashionable mania, Mr. Stevenson had a piece of
the handiwork of that double-faced scoundrel.
Deacon Brodie, who was outwardly a cabinet-
maker and a respected official in the Church,
c 33

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

but who, beside his legitimate trade, lived by
gambling and burglary. Louis used to complain
that the Deacon's cabinet creaked eerily in the
night watches.

Mr. Stevenson had, his son says, ' a morbid
sense of his own unworthiness. He would never
consent to be an elder in St. Stephen's, though
his advice was often sought, and he ser\'ed the
Church of Scotland on many committees. Mor-
bid, too, was his sense of the fleetingness of life
and his concern for death.' He once wrote, by
request of the editor of a Scottish religious
magazine, a paper entitled * Vanity of Vanities :
A Layman's Sermon.' He preached well. It
is distinctly a sermon with grit in it. He de-
scribes a worldly man's death and funeral with
a grim truthfulness ; tells how the dead man's
friends, who had often met at his convivial board,
assemble in his dining-room for the last time ere
their host departs * to the narrow house appointed
for all living.' With a few masterly strokes he
depicts the selfish heartlessness of the dead man's
household, the coachman in the harness-room
scanning the papers for a new place, the gossiping
conversation in the mourning coaches. ' What
do we think of his life ? ' Mr. Stevenson pointedly
asks. * Are ours any truer or better ? Have we

34

EDINBURGH DAYS

done any more than he did for the sick and suffer-
ing poor, or for Christ's cause on the earth ? '
Thomas Stevenson was a man who pondered
much on ' the claims of Christ and His cause.'
He was a man generous in helping the sick or
sorrowful in his sincere, unobtrusive way, but
that was one light he never flashed before his
fellows. He wrote also in the defence of Chris-
tianity, and his work was highly praised by many
learned authorities. His * Layman's Sermon '
is to be found in a volume of his Life and Work,
It is a pity it is so deeply buried, for many have
evinced renewed interest in it since they dis-
covered that it was preached by the father of
Robert Louis Stevenson.

In Edinburgh Mr. Stevenson ' breathed an
air that pleased him,' and into the country
round the fair city he loved to wander ' with a
congenial friend, if he did not keep dangling
about the town from one book shop to another,
and scraping romantic acquaintance with every
dog that passed.' He addressed all his canine
friends with a courteous civility. There was
a liver-and-white spaniel, which long Hved a
vagrant existence about the west end of Princes
Street. Mr. Stevenson used to visit it con-
stantly, and invite it to lunch at a confectioner's.

:>^

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

With his slow, purposeful step he would turn
aside out of the throng to converse with his
four-legged acquaintance, and the spaniel, with
hungry brown eyes thirsting for notice, would
gaze trustfully up into his steady grey eyes.
He christened his friend by a family name,
* Bob.' I also often greeted this stray spaniel,
and Mr. Stevenson was surprised one day when
he found we had a mutual friend. At first he
pretended to be jealous of any other patron of
this spotted dog, but he finally confided to me
its name and its tastes. If any one discovered
him in a doorway talking to or meditating over
Bob, who meanwhile wagged a joyous stumpy
tail, and held his head aloft so as to have his
chin scratched or his ears pulled, Mr. Stevenson
was embarrassed and apologetic. Sometimes at
his own table, when the wintry storm was driving
at the windows and he was sitting amid peace
and plenty, he would, with real concern, wonder
if ' Bob ' had got into the shelter of some friendly
doorway, or whether he had strayed into the
Caledonian station and sought shelter by some
lamp-room fire. Like other Edinburgh dogs,
' Bob ' no doubt * raked the backets,' i.e., fed
off the refuse boxes put out nightly by house-
holders for the dustmen to lift next morning.
36

EDINBURGH DAYS

On Saturday nights no ' backets * are put out,
as no carts go rumbling along on the Sabbath.
Mr. Stevenson was sore distressed that Sunday
was unavoidably a fast day for the spaniel and
other homeless dogs. He hoped * Bob ' was
foreseeing and buried a bone, even if it had to
be resurrected out of the West Kirk-yard for
his Sunday's dinner. Mr. Stevenson only spoke
of his four-footed friend when he thought he had
a sympathetic listener. He was sincere in his
affections, and in his conduct * transparently
honest,' his son says ; but this earnest simplicity
of his made him much beloved and much rever-
enced. Louis, even to a casual observer, was an
emotional youth, and evidently a bundle of
nerves, whims, and fancies. It surprised stran-
gers to find that the father, a grave, granite-
looking man, was also full of strange theories,
fantastic thoughts, and an almost exaggerated
chivalry towards all laws and sentiments regard-
ing the weaker sex. His strong leaning to
melancholy gave him a pondering, deep-thinking
expression. His wife and child, on the other
hand, were of gay and sanguine disposition, yet
in strong sympathy with the head of the house.
It was lucky for all that they, in some measure,
counterbalanced his seriousness. The Rev.

37

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Lewis Balfour was a * contented gentleman,' we
read in his grandson's record, and it was well
that that youth had his full share of this bright-
some Balfour characteristic. He needed it, for
if Louis had inherited his father's diffident, dark-
ened nature, it would have gone hard with him.
He had so poor a measure of health that he
required all his mother's cheerful buoyancy of
spirit to carry him over the rough waters of con-
tinued sickness. His loss was really our gain,
for it was owing to his ill health he was unable
to partake in doughty deeds. If he had been
able-bodied he would have acted them, and not
sat at home and imagined them on paper, for us
as well as for himself. Out of his weakness
came his strength, or, as one said of him, 'it
seems probable that the writer would have been
lost had the man been dowered with better
health.' Perhaps his father's gloominess was an
efficient warning to him to cultivate a Mark
Tapley jollity of spirits, whatever ill cards For-
tune dealt him. He early observed when Mr.
Stevenson encountered some comparative mole-
hill in his path and was oppressed with fore-
bodings, that these were dispelled by his mother's
invincible determination to look only to the
bright side of things.

3S

EDINBURGH DAYS

A writer in a magazine of to-day has stated
that Robert Louis Stevenson * was bored with
his father's stories, which others enjoyed, and
his father was a more lovable man than he in
those days. His unpopularity may have been
due to his being a bad listener.' I do not think
this was the case, though I grant the father was
a greater favourite than the son, w^ho, in his
Edinburgh days, was not generally liked. I
personally recollect that Louis seemed always
ready to do his utmost in company to draw out
Mr. Stevenson's quaint views or his pet stories.
He listened with a sparkle of pleasure in his
almond-shaped dark eyes, watching how his
father's anecdotes struck the audience, and more
anxious than the narrator for the merited ap-
probation. Louis's own way of spinning a yarn
was ludicrously different from his father's. Louis
had a full flow of language, and he gesticulated
freely with both hands while he talked and
walked. He could recapitulate no narrative,
propound no idea, without waving his thin hands
about, shrugging his shoulders absurdly like some
typical stage Frenchman. His father spoke in
a measured, calm voice, sitting slightly bent
forward, with his broad-browed, square-featured,
unmistakably Scotch face lit up at seasonable

39

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

times by a flicker of fun. He would presence an
immovable solemnity of appearance while depict-
ing some humorous incident, and not till it was
finished and appreciated by his auditors did the
corners of his firmly set mouth relax into a
smile.

Mr. Stevenson, with his wife and son, formed
a united trio. They had, besides the bonds of
affection that closely bound them, many tastes
in common, and a host of jests, a shibboleth of
nonsense which the engineer enjoyed as a re-
laxation from his work and its worries. * How
vivid is the remembrance of the happy home in
Heriot Row ! the kindly, clever head of the
house ; the bright, pleasant wife and mother ;
and the fragile, imaginative boy, who was after-
wards to become so famous,' says a writer in
Chambers's Journal who evidently knew the trio
I speak of well. * We used to wonder how any
two of the three could exist if the third were
called away, each seemed so necessary^ to all.'

Wlien death, for the second time, made a gap
in the circle in December 1894, the announce-
ment in the obituary column of the Scotsman
described Robert Louis Stevenson, not as the
man of letters the world deplored, but simply
as ' the only son of the late Thomas Stevenson,

EDINBURGH DAYS

C.E.* To many in his native Edinburgh he was
known as that ' only son,' whose future seemed
all too doubtful in the olden days, when he
completed the trio round his father's hearth.
If he lived (and that was the foremost and
biggest doubt), in the well-known adage of his
Northern land, where they sup their broth with
home-made cutlery, he seemed more likely ' to
mar a horn ' than ' mak' a spune.'

Mrs. Stevenson and her son had often to flee
South on health pilgrimages, and leave the en-
gineer alone in the chilly North. He longed to
hear daily how they fared. The two invalids had
a difficulty in varying the bulletins, and they
liked variety. No letter had come from Tor-
quay, so Mr. Stevenson telegraphed for news.
* Queen Anne's dead,' wired Louis, by his
mother's suggestion, in reply. The telegram
gave the anxious, lonely man a terrible shock,
and he strongly reprimanded the levity of the
senders. The two unrepentant culprits often
jokingly reminded him of the stern letter they
received, and how for the rest of that winter
they were reduced to platitudes on the weather
or the beauty of their resting-place. Then to
defend himself Mr. Stevenson explained what a
shock Queen Anne's death had given him that

41

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

day, and drew a pathetic picture of himself, a
solitary man, opening the orange envelope and,
owing to a mist of anxiety which dimmed his
sight, seeing only two words, ' Dead. — Louis.'

The head of the house at Heriot Row died in
May 1887, and a volume Louis brought out at
that time bore the beautiful dedication : —

To MY Mother,

IN THE

Name of Past Joy and Present Sorrow,

I Dedicate

These Memories and Portraits.

On a copy of these ' honey-dropping essays *
he wrote a few lines in Samoa : —

' Much of my soul is here interred,

My very past and mind,
Who listens nearly to the printed word
May hear the heart behind.'

Thomas Stevenson was honoured as well as
loved by his only son all through his life. Louis
knew well that, if his father seemed hard in his
censure, his wounds, like those of a friend, were
faithful ones. W^en he realized the responsi-
bility with which a conscientious man like his
father regarded the duty of bringing his son up
in the way he believed he should go, he under-
42

EDINBURGH DAYS

stood him all the better, and regretted he had
made his task the harder by resenting his legiti-
mate authority. In the Silverado Squatters Louis
speaks of a ' brother Scot ' who drove him about,
and was, he says, ' as kind to me as if I were
his son ; even more so, for the son has faults too
keenly felt, while the abstract countr>'man is per-
fect like a whiff of peats.'

The father and son had a long dispute over
the latter's choice of a profession ; but when the
son became a master craftsman no one paid him
a surer compliment than did the father, who fain
would have seen him an engineer, the sixth who
had ser\'ed the Board of Northern Lights. Mr.
Stevenson was a believer in Lord Lytton's theory
that * more is got from one book on which the
thought settles for a definite end in knowledge
than from libraries skimmed over by wander-
ing eyes. A cottage garden gives honey to the
bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly.'
Louis tells us his father's three favourite authors
were Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona.
' The first he must have read for twenty years
uninterruptedly, keeping it near him in his study,
and carr>^ing it in his bag on journeys. Another
old theologian. Brown of Wamphray, was often
in his hands. \Mien he was indisposed he had

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

two books, Guy Mannering and The Parent's
Assistant, of which he never wearied.' To these
select few Thomas Stevenson added two more.
They lay on a small table in his dining-room,
and were known by his family as * his luncheon
bibles.' After breakfast he gathered his house-
hold for * worship,' and for this purpose a big
volume of the Book stood handy. After his
midday meal he liked a printed page to ponder
over. His two favourite luncheon bibles became
An hiland Voyage and the Travels with a Donkey.

\Mien he wandered with his son in print in
the Cevennes, he also longed to have an argu-
ment with the soldier and the priest at the Lady
of the Snows who would have led to Rome
Thomas Stevenson, his wife, and their family.
Honest man ! how he thirsted to have his say
and defend his Presbyterianism. Wlien they
suggested to Louis that if he would turn Catholic
he would convert his parents in time, he ex-
claimed, ' I think I see my father's face ! I
would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion in his den
than embark on such an enterprise against the
family theologian.'

Many a tough battle, many a wordy war, they
had, but they both enjoyed such skirmishes.
Louis freely confesses he liked ' an adversary

44

EDINBURGH DAYS

who will hold his ground foot by foot and give
us full measure of the dust and exertion of battle.'
Mr. Stevenson thought much over religion and
believed much. He was a resolute Presbyterian,
a man of strong convictions, but capable of de-
fending them. Louis had been well grounded in
the tenets of the Scottish Church. ' About the
very cradle there goes a hum of metaphysical
divinity. I do not wish to make an idol of the
Shorter Catechism, but the fact of such a ques-
tion as, " What is the chief end of man ? " being
asked, and answering nobly if obscurely, " To
glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever," opens
to us Scotch a great field of speculation ; and
the fact that it is asked of all of us, from the
peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly
together.'

As he grew up Louis developed very unortho-
dox, almost atheistical views, going, as youth
goes when given to convulsions of thought, to
the far extreme from his upbringing. He also
revelled in blazoning abroad his newly acquired
views. He judged his father and every one
who did not agree with him as bigoted. He did
not realize that he himself was strongly tinctured
with the short-sighted, overbearing intolerance of
youthful inexperience.

'1?

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Speaking of Ferguson, the poet, who died in
his * acute painful youth ' in an Edinburgh mad-
house, Louis contrasts, in a letter lately pub-
Hshed, their mutual weakness and misunderstood
sufferings when both were rebellious, headstrong
young men. ' Ah ! what bonds we have. Bom
in the same city, both sickly, both vicious, both
pestered — one nearly to madness and one to the
madhouse — with a damnatory creed, both seeing
the stars and the moon and wearing shoe leather
on the same ancient stones, under the same
pends, down the same closes where our common
ancestors clashed in their armour rusty or bright.'

Louis was less pestered than pestering with
the damnatory creed he speaks of. He liked to
heckle his father on his strict doctrines, while he
aired his recently acquired ones. Mr. Stevenson
replied gravely and earnestly, and, all things
considered, was wonderfully patient with the
positive, aggressive boy. * To grow a little
Catholic is the compensation of years ; youth
is one-eyed,' Louis owned ; and if he had lived
longer, or if his father and he had met again
after Louis left Edinburgh, they might have
found they were not so diverse in doctrine.

Louis Stevenson improved with years. The
volcanic convulsions of his insurgent days past,

46

EDINBURGH DAYS

he mellowed in character, widened in under-
standing, and harked back more to the content-
ment and happy-hearted goodness which made
him lovable as a small child. When he shook so
violently at the bars of circumstance, and re-
volted against religion and society, it was no
wonder he was not popular in Edinburgh, for
he was then lacking in many of the better
qualities which endeared him later to the whole
world. According to descriptions of him in his
latter days at Samoa he seemed to have studied
God's Book more in the reverent manner it was
studied and read under his father's roof.

Mr. Stevenson and his only son in the teeth
of their hot discussions and mutual heartaches
were to the last firm friends and comrades.
Thomas Stevenson, like his father before him,
was full of ' unfeigned, unstained, unwearied
human kindliness.' He was reticent with the
reticence of the Scot during his life. Anything
out of the ordinary groove which might be con-
strued into a wish to attract notice was repug-
nant to him ; but he desired before the grave
in the Dean Cemetery closed over him that there
should be read to a few chosen friends his firm
behef in ' that sure and certain hope,' so that
they who truly loved and mourned him would

47

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

have his posthumous message impressed on their
minds that it might be to them a stay in time
of need.

* 17, Heriot Row, Edinburgh.

* May I be allowed to say very humbly — God
knows how humbly — that, believing in Christ, I
confidently trust I shall not be disowned by Him
when the last trumpet shall sound.

* My good friends ! I hope our friendship is
not ended, but only for a time interrupted, and
that we may all meet again in that better land
which has been prepared for us by our Father
and our Saviour, the blessed passport to which
has been freely offered to all. Amen.

' Thomas Stevenson.

* This I desire to be read at my funeral.*

MRS. STEVENSON

49

It is not yours, O mother, to complain,

Not, mother, yours to weep,
Though never more your son again

Shall to your bosom creep,
Though never more again you watch

Your baby sleep.'

— UmUrwoods.

CHAPTER III

MRS. STEVENSON

Louis's mother, as we have seen, was a daughter
of the manse. Her old home at CoHnton, ' a
well-beloved house, its image dwelt on by many
travellers,* is now altered. To casual observ^ers,
looking on a picture of it as it was in Mrs.
Stevenson's time, it seems much the same as of
yore. Casual obser\'ers, however, did not know
every door, window, and weather-beaten mark
on its friendly face, the place of every tree and
flower in its garden. The manse drinks deep
of the blessings of shelter. It lies in a cul-de-sac
at the very depth of a wooded basin, * brimmed
like a cup with sunshine.' Straight in front,
separated only from its base by the dusky Water
of Leith, rises a wooded cliff fringed with firs,
a cliff so inaccessibly steep that it is a marvel
how such tall trees found root on its perpendicular
and sliding soil. They look as if they would
topple into the manse chimneys, but tier on tier
firmly they climb on, till they reach the top of

51

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

the well-clothed bluff, and the crows, then as
now, caw hoarsely over this sheltered hollow.
Behind the manse, and cutting it off from the
road (Louis speaks of their phaeton coming to
the kitchen door, * for such was our unlordly
fashion '), stands the church. Robert Louis
Stevenson observed of the manse, with the river
lapping its garden, the graveyard on the westerly
side looking down on it, that * it is difficult to
suppose it was healthful.' In those pre-hygienic
times people throve under conditions which to
us appear suicidally insanitary.

An ever-increasing circle of villas, boasting,
like upstarts, of the superiority of their high and
salubrious site, look down on the old manse to-
day, from the airy rim of that once secluded
den, now a suburb of Edinburgh. Trains run
through the dell ' where spunkies danced,* as
Louis believed, taking the residents of the mush-
room villas to and from Edinburgh, a few miles
off. Miss Balfour, the * Auntie ' of Louis's
Garden of Verses —

' Chief of our aunts — not only I
But all your dozen of nurslings cry,
What did the other children do?
And what were childhood wanting you?' —

remembers how little they thought of that inter-

52

EDINBURGH DAYS

vening four miles ; how they returned from their
walk to town, recollecting a forgotten errand, set
off again to Auld Reekie. Miss Balfour, kept
young by her practical interest in all the succes-
sive families of nephews and nieces she has
mothered, speaks enviously of the ease with
which her grand-nieces spin on cycles over the
ground. * You would have enjoyed one when
you were young,' said a visitor. * I 'd enjoy
one now,' she replied, for neither deafness nor
failing sight has quelled the sprightly spirit
of her race. Mrs. Stevenson, fond of her
early home, like all who were reared in that
green-lined nest, loved to take her boy back
to Colinton, little dreaming the old manse would
be portrayed so vividly by the small hand
she held.

She was married in 1848, and when she left
her father's roof for Howard Place, if the old
proverb speaks true, she need not have given
much thought to her trousseau, ' for a bonnie
bride is soon buskit.' All those who recollect
her then, speak of her fair looks — looks which
lasted to the end of her sixty-eight years ; for,
besides her clear-cut features, her cultured mind,
her genial address, gave her a perennial beauty
of expression that outlived the bloom of youth.

53

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Her buoyancy of spirit, her complacent serenity
in regard to the inevitable, her pleased content-
ment with her environments — all these Louis
learned from her. Mrs. Stevenson was twenty
years her son's senior, and it amused and flattered
them both that, when going out to dinner
together, the serv'ant, judging him to be too
young to be married, turned a deaf ear to the
names they gave, and announced them as Mr.
and Miss Stevenson.

There is extant a chalk drawing of Mrs. Steven-
son when about twenty-five, and one of Louis
done at the same time. He has stiff, old-maidish
ringlets, which must have given Cummy much
trouble to fix in such sleek order. They are so
rigid as to suggest being supported in their
position by hairpins. These unnatural curls
were shortly afterwards shorn. Mr. Stevenson
took advantage of Cummy's being off on a holi-
day to subject Smoutie's ladylike locks to the
barber's mercy. Cummy has them now among
her keepsakes ; ver>^ fine yellow hair it is, not
yet darkened to correspond with his oriental
eyes and complexion. The chalk drawing of
Mrs. Stevenson represents her, as Louis remem-
bered her so well, when she chaperoned him to
children's parties. He proudly boasted that no

54

EDINBUKGH DAYS

child had so pretty a mother as he. When he
was a man he recalled how others had heavy,
serious mothers ' who sat and looked on,' while
his mother was so girlishly graceful and so light-
heartedly bUthe that no juvenile guest enjoyed
herself with more zest than she. From this
picture her refined face smiles down on one.
Her smooth hair is braided over her ears in the
mid-Victorian style, making a softening frame
to her regular features. It is exactly the same
face. we in Edinburgh, who knew her till so
recently, loved. Mrs. Stevenson always im-
pressed one as being richly dressed, though no
one could say, when asked, what she wore, so
invariably quiet and ladylike was her taste.
Certainly from neither of his parents did Louis
take his bizarre fancy for garish colour and
fashion in dress.

Mrs. Stevenson's pliableness of temperament
was never more clearly shown than in the way
she cast off civilization, in spite of her love for
everything that was correctly comfortable, and
set off to follow her migrator>^ son among un-
couth surroundings in distant lands. She went
stockingless and clothed in easy garments, and
lived that primitive life as if to the manner
bom. She heartily enjoyed the roughing of it,

55

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

though the opportunity of basking in the sun-
shine of her son's presence first induced her to
leave the comforts of civiUzation. Looking over
the photographs of these South Sea joumeyings,
Mrs. Stevenson appeared always decorously
attired in her widow's cap, retaining even there
her spruce trigness, her hair as usual smoothly
dressed, when others had flower-entwined heads
and flowing, unkempt locks. ' Whenever I saw
the camera come to the fore,' she explained,
smiling, * I seized my cap out of the basket
where I kept it ready, and "preened my feathers."
I tucked in my feet, though I never went quite
barefoot like the others, for I was terrified of
stepping on some beast. I never could walk
without shoes, but of course I wore no stockings,
except when I went to church. They laughed
at me, but, however warm, I always put them on
for service.*

Mrs. Stevenson transplanted herself and all
her old home furniture out to Vailima, meaning
to settle there for her life, never dreaming, as
she said, * to weep the eyes that should have
wept for me,' but, she added in the same letter,
with that unselfish resignation, that determina-
tion to see good in everything, ' His dear eyes
have been saved these tears, and / must be glad

56

EDINBURGH DAYS

joY thai' In his own words she could truly say,
and comfort herself therewith —

' O stricken heart, remember, O remember.
How of human days he lived the better part.'

Frail in health, as Louis had ever been, it was
more than probable he might be one of those
creaking doors which are said to hang longest.
Mrs. Stevenson herself had suffered from the
inclement winds of Edinburgh. Her father, in
his youth, had sought for health in the Isle of
Wight, and his grandson, after trying both
hemispheres, enviously adds, ' whereas he found
it and kept it, I am still on the quest.'

Two of Dr. Lewis Balfour's children were ail-
some in youth, and it appeared unlikely they
would resist the effects of the deeply-buried
situation of the manse and its overshadowing
graveyard. Yet they grew up and went out
into the world like the others reared there, and
surv'ive to-day, hale and hearty, having passed
useful lives in the thick of our too maligned
Edinburgh climate. Louis, when grown-up,
often tempted providence by outlandish expedi-
tions, unnecessary buffetings with weather, and
want of proper comfort. After settling finally
in what he thought salubrious Samoa, the Hghts
of his life, which had * been a little turned down,'

57

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

had flared up astonishingly strong again, and it
was beHeved the author had found an El Dorado,
where his health would, as his years advanced,
increase in strength.

Mrs. Stevenson came back twice to this country
from the enervating softness of her son's island
retreat to recruit and see her sister, and finally in
1891 took herself and all the endeared belongings
of her married home to Samoa.

The familiar furnishings of Heriot Row sailed
to the South, where they remain. They were for
ever associated with her husband and boy ;
how often had they watched him when, as he
recorded —

* With my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.'

Mrs. Stevenson fully expected to end her life
with her boy at Vailima. His improved health
gave every hope for years of useful work before
him. His mother never believed he would
achieve the * fine success ' he craved for in her
lifetime. Louis always hoped that his end
would be speedy when his time came. ' If only
I could secure a violent death, what a fine
success\ * he writes. * I wish to die in my boots ;

53

EDINBURGH DAYS

no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be
drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse,
aye, to be hanged, rather than pass again through
that slow dissolution.'

Victor Hugo likens an overwhelming blow to a
Waterloo, a slow decay a St. Helena. The 3rd
December, 1894, was a Waterloo to the VaiUma
household. On none did it fall heavier than on
his mother, who had known and loved him long-
est, who was now a widow and childless, and who
had lost a son of whom she had the right to be
proud, for she had been the first to foresee the
honoured position he would attain to by his pen.
She returned to Edinburgh immediately after
his death, to the one tie she had left there. Miss
Balfour, her elder sister, who had mothered her
in her schooldays. Miss Balfour needed her,
so Mrs. Stevenson settled down in Edinburgh,
choosing for her new home a house which over-
hung the valley of the Leith. At first her old
friends were afraid to see her, for fear the trials
she had encountered since she had left them
would have left defacing scars upon her and her
wound be still too painful to look on. But she
came back and took her former place with un-
flinching bravery, and the one theme she specially
Uked to hear others broach, or to enlarge on

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

herself, was Louis. Appreciation of him was
balm to her wounds. She had his photographs
around her, and from Samoa had brought back
one link with Heriot Row, a striking likeness of
her husband, by Sir George Reid, now to be seen
in the Edinburgh National Portrait Gallery.
That supple nature of hers allowed her to take
her place once more in an orthodox Edinburgh
drawing-room, and it was hard to realize that
she, sitting there in her faultless widow's attire,
darning daintily with her capable hands, had
gone about stockingless, ridden through forest
paths, and sat at feasts with the Samoan chiefs.
She said she might return some time to visit that
grave on the mountain top where she had seen
her son laid. She had always taken an interest
too in foreign missions, and she had a longing
to work for her Church among the Samoans. So
quietly and quickly did she resettle in the North,
one almost forgot she had ever been away in
such untamed parts. Mrs. Stevenson had a
spirit of enterprise in her, a liking to subject
herself to experiences, an inquisitiveness as to
novelties, and Louis inherited this thirst to taste
of the unknown. Mrs. Stevenson never lost her
taste for exploring a terra incognita. In the last
September she was among us, being in the
60

EDINBURGH DAYS

country she expressed a wish to get on a cycle
to try how it felt, and write to those left at
Vailima and tell them what she thought of it.
There was a wheel put at her disposal christened
Dobbin, in the hopes that sedate name would
incline it to steadiness. Lithe of figure, straight
as an arrow, undeterred by her sixty-seven years,
Mrs. Stevenson vaulted on the iron horse with
ease, and displayed an instinctive idea of balance.
She said she knew she had an inborn notion of
equilibrium from the way she had kept her seat
all untutored as an equestrian on a flesh and
blood horse in Samoa. Not contented only to
mount Dobbin, she, barely supported by an
anxious teacher, sent him gaily along the road
on which he had borne many wobbling beginners.
None, however, managed him better than this
agile, well-balanced sexagenarian rider in mantle
and bonnet, garments which she said befitted
her years, but were hampering for this exercise.
The second day she careered on Dobbin down
a hill, steering well to the middle of the road
and going at a pace which left her attendant in
the rear. * If people would not think it ridicu-
lous of me, I think I would take to cycling,' she
said when an upward slope brought her journey
to a triumphant finish. * It is delightful. I

6i

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

envy people I see from my windows at Randolph
Cliff whirling across the Dean Bridge.'

That same September she visited a lighthouse
on a great foreland which was one of her hus-
band's beacons. The keepers received her cor-
dially. They showed her Thomas Stevenson's
unsurpassed inventions and his signature on
their books. They asked her for her autograph,
and expressed their gratification in having seen
the wife of one

' Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled
To plant a star for seamen,'

and his son proudly boasted, —

' These are thy works, O father, these thy crown.
Whether on high the air be pure, they shine
Along the yellowing sunset, and all night
Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine.'

Mrs. Stevenson quoting these lines among the
sounds of winds and wings and solitary cries,
observed it was pleasing to her to be honoured
and welcomed as Thomas Stevenson's wife ; * for
of late years,' she said, * I have become so
accustomed to be known only as R. L. S.'s
mother.* She reminded us, too, of an incident
Louis refers to in his sketch of his father ; how
a friend of his was asked in South America if
* he knew Mr. Stevenson, the author, because
62

EDINBURGH DATS

his works were much esteemed in Peru. He sup-
posed the reference was to the writer of tales ;
but the Peruvian had never heard of Dr. Jek>^l,
what he had in his eye, what w^as esteemed in
Peru, were the volumes of the engineer.'

Mrs. Stevenson, clever and cultured as she
was, never wished for any distinctive career of
her own. To her it was acceptable to be known
either as the wife of Thomas Stevenson (to whom
the Germans gave the title of * the Nestor of
lighthouse illumination ') or the mother of Robert
Louis Stevenson. Finding herself reverenced as
the parent of a distinguished son when she went
to visit Lx)uis at Skerr^^vore, his Bournemouth
home, she was told that the Shelleys had been
attracted to him, and Louis had been given by
Sir Percy a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft ;
and Mrs. Stevenson heard how Sir Percy thought
her son was mentally like his father, and that
the poet's spirit lived again in R. L. S. This
portrait our Tusitala was to look on as that of
a spiritual ancestress, from whom he inherited
a pedigree of genius ; and it hung at Vailima
among Stevenson family portraits of the engin-
eers. Mrs. Stevenson told us, hearing Lady
Shelley had called and was alone, she glancing
at herself in a glass to see there was no hair awr\%

63

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON^S

went smiling into the room, ready, she said, to
be adored as the mother of the man her visitor
and Sir Percy flattered and praised. But, when
she introduced herself, Lady Shelley rose indig-
nantly and turned from her proffered hand. She
accused Mrs. Stevenson of having robbed her of
a son, for she held Louis should have been sent
to her, that he was the poet's grandson ; but by
some perv^erse trickery, of which she judged Mrs.
Stevenson guilty, this descendant of Percy Bysshe
had come to a house in Howard Place, Edinburgh,
instead of hers at Boscombe Manor. A some-
what parallel case happened to Dr. Johnson on
his travels ; for Lady Eglintoune found, says
Boswell, that she ' was married the year before
Dr. Johnson was born, upon which she graciously
said to him that she might have been his mother
and that she now adopted him, and when we
were going away she embraced him saying, " My
dear son, farewell." ' Lady Eglintoune, like Lady
Shelley, adopted a ' might have been son.' Louis
Stevenson himself beheved he had fallen heir to
Robert Ferguson's unhappy poetic soul ; while
Lady Shelley, according to Mrs. Stevenson, was
firmly convinced that she had been defrauded
of a son, and never abated in her animosity
towards her for this robbery. This, said Mrs.
64

EDINBURGH DAYS

Stevenson, was the only time any one fell foul
of her for having given to the world the popular
author.

Mrs. Stevenson had early guessed in what
direction lay her Louis's road to fame. She
fostered his love of writing, and was, with
Cummy, the first of his devoted readers. Even
if he had never grown famous, to hear her in
her latter years speak of ' Little Lew ' would
have drawn listeners about her, for she had the
art of telling a simple tale with pathos and
humour, which impressed it on her hearers.
Her unceasing interest in everything connected
with him, her every thought given so wholly
to him, made her hsteners in her drawing-room,
looking adown the valley, realize how great was
her love. She, so * austerely led,' was never
seen otherwise than ' well content.' If people
marv^elled at her heartsome blitheness of spirit,
she with her serene felicity replied she had small
cause to repine with a happy record of married
life to dwell on, and having been gifted with a
son whose genius she was the first to appreciate,
whose distinguished position in the world of
letters was her glory and comfort. In acknow-
ledging a photograph of the plain-faced Httle
house in Howard Place, she wrote : * How I wish

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

I was back in it forty-five years ago ! Well, I
had a long time of happiness. I have many
precious memories left, and I feel that I have
much cause for thankfulness, but still my heart
cries out for '' my boy." ' Grief never wrung
an audible complaint from her. It was her un-
selfishness which enabled her to face her sorrow
and the interest she took in the weal or woe of
all around her. To the world, to the sister she
tended, she turned a serene, placid face.

She had treasured up all her recollections of
Louis from his babyhood. She had kept all news-
paper cuttings about him from the days when his
youthful efforts first appeared in print. She had
his six-year-old dictated MS., an essay on Moses,
and his privately printed little booklets, now so
sought after by collectors. Shirley speaks of
strolling one long, light evening from his Hermit-
age of Braid with Principal Tulloch across to
Swanston and getting there a volume in which
Robert Louis Stevenson's ' juvenile contributions
to local journals had been carefully put together
and preserved. We read them next morning —
the Principal in his bedroom before breakfast, as
was his way — and we then agreed that, what-
ever came of it, here was a fresh voice with
a note delicate and unborrowed as the lark's,

EDINBURGH DAYS

Hardly any one but his mother guessed as yet
what was in store ; but she was prescient, as
mothers are.* Among many who visited her for
her son's sake came Mr. Barrie, when she was
home from Samoa, one winter. He was anxious
for her to meet his mother, and Mrs. Stevenson
regretted she had not taken the journey to
Thrums. Mrs. Stevenson was much amused
at the way in which he tried to tempt her to find
time to go. If Mrs. Barrie in her loyalty to her
own son bore Robert Louis Stevenson a grudge,
why, Mrs. Stevenson asked, would she care to
see her ?

' She would like,' answered Mr. Barrie, ' to tell
you how I came through the whooping cough,
and ask you if your son had any dregs from the
measles.'

How interesting it would have been to have
had a photograph of these two mothers dis-
cussing their sons, their books, or their infantine
ailments ! If Mrs. Stevenson and she had met,
it is to be hoped Mrs. Stevenson would have
walked in unawares and caught Mrs. Barrie by
the hearth w^e know and perchance sitting with
that unholy fascinating knave, Ballantrae. Her
piercing but kindly eyes would have scrutinized

the handsomely dressed mother of the man whom

67

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

she feared would have wiled her devoted lad away
from her to his tropic retreat. It would have
defied Margaret Ogilvy's penetrating observ^ation
to have found a fault with her guest's appearance.
However blowy the day, there would not have
been one hair astray, or however dusty not a
speck of travel-stain on her fine black dress.
Mrs. Stevenson was always immaculately trim
in her attire. Mrs. Barrie would have found the
whilom daughter of the manse, with that ready
address of hers, eager to listen to Thrums tales,
of honours to a Thnims man, or to a Thrums
boy's precocity. Mrs. Stevenson would have
envied her hostess having * her boy ' there, and
doubtless Mrs. Barrie with her quick intuition
would have found the Road to that Loving Heart
by her sympathy for the mother who loved be-
yond compare the ' only son ' granted to her, and
who mourned him with a Spartan cheerfulness.
Mrs. Stevenson read with an understanding smile
of Mrs. Barrie's jealous aversion, her gradual
capitulation to R. L. S.'s seductive writing,
and she deplored too late, with Margaret Ogilvy
in her hand, that she had not journeyed to
Thrums.

Mrs. Stevenson's absorbing pride in her son
was as transparent as her husband's succouring

68

EDINBURGH DAYS

lights which flash out, dazzling in their con-
centrated strength. Abnormal as it was, there
was no vaingloriousness in it, only pure prideful
pleasure undimmed by any small selfish conceits.
Whether she was fonder of the author as the new
master of romance, the subtle supple stylist, or
her boy, * Little Lew,' it is hard to say. Often
and often she heard, as she sat in * peaceful
turret pent,' not the applause of the many who
loved his tales, but his pattering footsteps. Even
in remembrance that was sweetest music to her.
She obeyed his injunctions as she had obeyed
his slightest desire she could gratify in life.

'You too, my mother, read my rhymes

For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance tx) hear once more
The little feet along the floor.'

Mrs. Stevenson, when she returned finally to
Edinburgh from Samoa —

'For
It brooks wi' nae denial.

That the dearest friends are the auldest friends.
And the young are just on trial ' —

liked to be of the audience at every lecture on
Robert Louis Stevenson she saw advertised.
There were many, for he had given to us a
host of lifelong friends. To him we owe the

69

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

acquaintanceship of honest Alan Breck and his
companion Davie Balfour, of many a clever
scoundrel and bold rascal, of Archie Weir and
his ' owre true ' father ; and lastly, that dashing
dare-devil St. Ives, who took us over the Castle
Rock and led us to further intimate acquaintance
with Swanston. Then, besides numerous friends
on paper, he gave us these essays full of living
words arranged with that felicitous grace of
expression of which he was the consummate
master. * Folk come here speirin' about young
Stevenson sin' he is deid,' said the present
gardener at Swanston, speaking of pilgrim
Stevensonians who bother him with questions ;
for Thackeray, with his cognizance of human
nature, says truly, * We all want to know details
regarding men who have achieved famous feats,
whether of war or wit, or eloquence or know-
ledge.' Sometimes illustrating these lectures on
Tusitala there were limelight views, and one
felt, as Mrs. Stevenson saw before her on the
screen a well-known scene, and heard quoted —

* I gang nae mair where ance I gaed,
By Brunston, Fairmilehead or Braid,
But far frae Kirk and Tron ' —

it must have been a stab anew for her to realize
that, no longer a willing exile in a palmy isle, he
70

EDINBURGH DAYS

lived so that across the waste of waters he would
send his voice, and end the verse : —

' O still ayont the muckle sea,
Still are ye dear, and dear to me,
Auld Reekie still and on.'

Others felt a lump in their throats when they
remembered that he had lain him down with a
will. There was no hope now that, some day
when a breath of the North came to him, he
might be tempted to come home. No more
letters, no more books of his could come across
the globe to us. The blank was difficult to
realize, but all the while his mother sat critical
and intent, apparently unruffled by any emotion
but her pleasure in hearing her son's praises sung,
his death lamented.

The Stevenson Memorial meeting was a gala
day to her. She started for the Music Hall
not too early, feeling secure of a seat with a
' reserve ticket ' in her neatly gloved hand.
When some one asked if she were going on the
platform, she replied emphatically in the nega-
tive. She had early Victorian ideas as to plat-
forms being proper only for the sterner sex. She
wished to be an unnoticed unit in the audience.
The crowd was beyond expectations. Mrs.
Stevenson arrived to find every passage blocked,

71

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

and a surging mass at the main entrance clamour-
ing for admittance. She feared that she, with
them, would be turned away ; but, as a forlorn
hope, she appealed to a policeman to get her in.

' It 's nae use, it 's fu',' he said ; ' reserve seats
ta'en an hour ago by folks that had nae tuckets,
and they would na gang out.'

' I must get in,' cried Mrs. Stevenson, roused
out of her usual calm by despair. ' I 've a right
to get in. I am Robert Louis Stevenson's
mother.'

* Aye, you 've the best right,' the policeman
replied, and, turning to the crowd, cried, ' Mak'
way there. She maun get in. She 's Roabert
Louis's mither.'

People who thought themselves packed too
tightly to move somehow packed closer, and let
Mrs. Stevenson squeeze and wriggle past.

Breathless, hustled, and, for once, her mantle
and bonnet a Httle awry, much against her will
the crowd pushed her on to the platform. There
she hastened to so literal a back seat that when
Lord Rosebery, to add to his tactful compli-
ment to her in the four telling words, ' his
mother is here,' with which he wellnigh began
his speech, looked around to bow with courtly
deference to her, he had to pause (and the pause

72

EDINBURGH DAYS

was vety effective), and to quietly engage other
eyes as well as his own to find to which side
Robert Louis's mother had unobtrusively with-
drawn.

Mrs. Stevenson was all aglow with the enthusi-
astic fulness of that meeting. She was visibly
overcome by the unexpectedly large crowd and
its tremendous enthusiasm. For once her usual
calm left her.

' A proud day for her to have a son a mitred
bishop,' writes Louis in Our Lady of the Snows,
of one who by ' special grace, against usual
ordinance,' was able to witness the crowning of
her child. ' It makes one glad they let her in,'
he adds sympathetically. A proud day was
December 9th, 1896 (two years after her Water-
loo), to iMrs. Stevenson, and she was thankful
for the ' special grace ' even in the shape of the
policeman who ushered her in to see her son,
like a prophet, for long without honour in his own
country, receive the homage of his native town.

A few months later, with Louis's name last on
her lips, after a short struggle with pneumonia,
she died. She was laid beside her husband in
the Dean Cemetery, that beautiful burial ground
in the west of Edinburgh. From it, secluded by
trees from the city, the great castle is seen

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

towering majestically, and round it, deep down
a bosky bank, the Water of Leith winds. That
humble brown stream lilted a lullaby, in very
truth a cradle song, to Mrs. Stevenson at the old
manse. It made lasting music in the memory
of her only son, who lies afar in that strange
mountain grave with the surf booming an in-
cessant requiem at its feet. He yearned to rest
among the good Scots clods with familiar stars,
true never-failing Northern lights, and the historic
hills of home keeping watch over him.

Perhaps the best, nay, the only explanation
of Mrs. Stevenson's uncomplaining front in the
face of her sorrow, when bereft of that brilliant
idolized son, is to be found in the Heriot Row
Bible she gave to an Edinburgh church. On a
leaf of it, in Mr. Stevenson's hand, is the date
of his marriage. Then, again, in it he wrote
the date of the birth of Robert Lewis Balfour,
their son. She added to it in her writing the
record of her husband's death, and then, when
a widow and childless, that of ' her boy,' their
only son. After that last date, she added, from
Psalm xxxix. 9, the words which gave the key
of her cheerful, silent fortitude when so bitterly
acquainted with grief—* I was dumb, I opened
not my mouth ; because Thou didst it.'

74

ALISON CUNNINGHAM

75

' For all you pitied, all you bore
In sad and happy days of yore,
My second mother, my first wife,
The angel of my infant life.'
—The Dedication to the * Garden of Verses.

CHAPTER IV

ALISON CUNNINGHAM

Another guardian of Louis's childhood was
Alison Cunningham. The day which brought
them together when he was eighteen months
old is worthy of a red-letter record in Louis's
calendar. Many a child has had as devoted a
nurse as young Louis, but no nurse from her
nursling had ever so deftly worded or so widely
known a tribute to her care as Alison Cunning-
ham received in the dedication of the Garden of
Verses. He remembered, when he penned these
lines, the ' long nights you lay awake and watched
for my unworthy sake * ; he knew then that his
second mother would have followed him across
the world, to nurse him as of yore, when he lay
ill. The letter she wrote volunteering to go to
her laddie he held in his clasp, as if to feel again
the touch of that ' comfortable hand ' which
had soothed away his childhood's sufferings.
She well deserved the pretty tribute that her
boy thus paid her in remembrance of all the

77

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

pains she comforted. She gave her whole heart
and energies to her charge. To her, as well as
to his mother, he owed his happy disposition.
He was never thwarted or denied anything that
could add to his happiness. Never a complain-
ing word escaped his nurse's lips, and he grew
up surrounded by the love of his two mothers.
Kept for such long spells in the house, he was
more dependent than most on a kindly, patient
ruler in the nursery. Night and day the child
had to be watched and amused. His active
brain supplied an endless series of questions,
and he never rested till they were answered.
Cummy had enjoyed a solid education such as
falls to most of her kind if they have the good
fortune to be born Scots. She came of a family
of fair worldly means and position. She belonged
to the good old days when domestic service was
not scorned as menial, when it was considered a
more fitting and honoured calling than service
behind a counter. Cummy's education was not
wasted. WTien she and Smout, as he said, spent

* Happy chimney-corner days.
Sitting safe in nursery nooks
Reading picture story books,'

it was a trained as well as a ' kind voice ' that
read to him with ease and expression. No one
78

EDINBURGH DAYS

enjoyed the works he aftenvards gave to the
world more than the nurse who with his mother,
on the nursery floor, taught the wee lad to find,
from out of the chaos of letters, C for Cummy
or crooked S for Stevenson.

* Cummy,' as she had been promptly christened
by her small charge, was reared at Torrybum,
a village even to-day out of the reach of trains
and placidly stranded on the north bank of the
Firth of Forth, whose waters lap up to its very
doors. It is a village of white houses, red roofs,
crow-stepped gables basking lazily in the sun.
Torr}-burn, along with some other of these west
of Fife boroughs, was of more importance when
the king sat in Dunfermline town. The smaller
ships of bygone times sailed up the unbridged
Firth to unload their cargoes at wharves snug
under the bield of wooded bluffs.

This west nook of the Kingdom of Fife, facing
the sun and protected from the hard winds, is to-
day still a green, sleepy hollow, lulled to rest
by the curfew, which still tolls nightly from
Culross steeple. Cummy grew up in this place,
rich with traditions of its past glories, and full
of the history and legends of her native land.
At her father's hearth she heard the old-time
tales of the smuggling days, and all the local

79

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

narratives of the resurrectionist times. Close to
the water's edge, along the fringes of Fife, were
many graveyards easy of access to those who
plied their ghastly trade. The people, knowing
how corpses had been stolen from their resting-
place, lived then in dread of their dead being
molested. Nevertheless, for all their watchful-
ness many a boat went off with its gruesome
cargo. It was for this reason that Cummy's
mother, dying in 1870, ordered she should not
be buried among her people in Torr>'burn
kirk^^ard, but in a town cemetery, where
such desecration was impossible. We may be
sure in good time young Louis knew all the
stories, true or traditionary, that Cummy had
to tell.

She had learned all she could be taught at
Torry^burn, where a relative of Cummy's, a Miss
Drummond, combined dressmaking and school-
keeping. Miss Drummond helped her sisters to
shape the lasting linsey-woolsey of the day into
fashionable gowns ; and while she plied her
needle or trimmed a tippet, she heard her pupils
recite. It is true that, on the ' Burial of Sir
John Moore,' perhaps owing to her absorption
in her sewing, or a dimness of sight, which took
in the look of a word and not its exact meaning,

§9

EDINBURGH DAYS

Sir John, at Torryburn, was buried with his
material cloak around him. In these dame
schools, however, even if they read * material '
for * martial,' the scholars laid a firm foundation
of learning. Alison was a promising pupil, and
her parents, to give a finish to her education,
sent her off to Dunfermline, four or five miles
distant. Alison had to live there in the darkest
winter days with some relatives, but she pre-
ferred Torryburn, and at week ends she returned
home, walking at the tail of the carrier's cart
for company. She made light of the distance in
summer, and walked gladly to and fro. Even
now she is spare and active, though deafness has
shut her off from the world of voices. Mrs.
Stevenson and Cummy used to tell little Lew,
when he began his school-going, that his lines
had fallen in easy times. His guardians had had
to rise in the dark and walk eight or ten miles
daily for their lessons.

Alison Cunningham never swerved in her
allegiance to her tender, ailing boy. In 1870
Louis wrote a dissertation on Nurses, in which he
draws a sad (all the sadder because it is true)
picture of a nurse neglected by her nursling
when he grew up, — she was left alone after
having given ' her best and happiest years in
F 81

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

tending, watching, and learning to love like a
mother this child, with which she has no con-
nection, and to which she has no tie. Perhaps
she refused some sweetheart (such things have
been), or put him off and off, until he lost heart
and turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving
this creature that had wound itself about her
heart.' He goes on to picture the Testament
she bought for her boy out of her poorly provided
purse, thrown aside, and how, maybe, he passed
her in the street, ashamed to recognise the old
woman that loved him. Louis as a youth of
twenty-one had noted how many of his friends'
old nurses were treated, but his had no reason
to complain. Her boy to the last did not forget
her, always * rememberful ' whenever he had a
new book of his own to give her. * Mothers,'
Louis wrote at the end of Nurses, * can be brought
to feel more tenderly to those who share their
toil and have no part in the reward.' Cummy
had full share of her ' reward ' — a word her boy
objected to. ' The world must return some day
to the word duty and be done with the word
reward. There are no rewards and plenty of
duties,' he said. To tend him was to her a labour
of love, and consideration and attention from his
parents and himself was the result of duty done
82

EDINBURGH DAYS

with a heart-whole devotedness. I heard Mrs.
Stevenson say that one day, when driving from
Cummy's home, she had complained to Louis
that she had never had a printed tribute Hke
Cummy's. She reminded him that she too had
taken more than her share of the anxious night
watches, and been as conscientious and adoring
a mother when he was Smoutie as when he
was R. L. S. the favoured author ; but Louis
explained that her maternal love and self-sacrifice
went without saying, whereas Cummy's services
were bought. He considered she more than de-
served any laurels that he could lay on her brows.
In her case there was duty well done and also
a rich reward.

Cummy has a house on the south side of
Edinburgh, a cemetery, she says, in front of her
and a madhouse behind her, but her sunny par-
lour, Hke her heart, is full of mementoes of Robert
Louis Stevenson. Mrs. Stevenson lately gave
her an album with a series of views of places and
people connected with their boy. Below each
photograph his mother had written a descriptive
quotation from his own works. There is Swan-
ston in its ' bouquet of trees * ; there is a portrait
of him as he played at Colinton as 'Little
Smoutie at the manse.* Cummy likes to sit by

83

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

visitors as they turn over the leaves, and look
at the various pictures of that family trio with
whom she spent her best days. Her own portrait
is there, taken some years ago, and a quotation
from the Gardeyi of Verses written by her mistress
below it. She was pleased, but shook a protest-
ing head, when an American visitor told her she
was like Mrs. Stevenson. But there was truth
in it. Alison's face is furrowed. She had not
the calm, smooth look and dignity of Mrs.
Stevenson, but her features are neatly chiselled
and of a refined type, like her mistress's. The
tears dim her eyes as she comes to the last page,
where, among the tangle of the rankly prolific
vegetation of the tropics, stands Louis's grave.
He had looked at that spot from his study window
at Vailima, and wrote of it * as my tomb which
is to be,' regretting, while he praises its lavish
Southern beaut>% that it was not to be his fate
' to be buried in the hills under the heather, and
a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the
whaups and plovers are cpy'ing. My heart
remembers how ? Ah, by God it does ! '
Cummy has not that control over her feelings
which made many marvel at Mrs. Stevenson's
seeming placidness when speaking of her sorrow.

Cummy's eyes well over as she points to a piece
84

EDINBURGH DAYS

of moss, which Mrs. Stevenson brought her from
that sacred spot. To be buried far from Scot-
land and kin seems a terrible thing to Cummy,
and she Hngers sadly over this last photo before
she lays the book down beside other keepsakes.
The child's mimic tea set stands on Cummy's
table. His aunt, Miss Balfour, gave it to him,
and that it still survives tells how girlishly gentle
* little Smoutie ' was. It has a tea-pot, cream-
jug, and sugar-bowl of Queen Anne shape, and
three cups on the tray, a dainty set all beflowered
with tiny pink roses. The cups hold * just a
thimbleful,' and many a one did his two mothers
drink at his tea parties, he playing various char-
acters in his rdle as host.

The walls are covered with pictures. Cummy
prizes one of Mentone, sent her and signed by
Robert Louis Stevenson. Mrs. Stevenson,
Cummy, and he had been there on a health
pilgrimage. It was Mrs. Stevenson who was
the invalid that winter. Leeches had been
ordered for her, and unawares, with others, a
horse one had been used, and had acted as a
vampire. Cummy tells how, uneasy about her
mistress, she stole down to her room at midnight
and found her strength far spent. For once Lew
was neglected. He wakened and found no

85

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Cummy to assure him, nor did she come at his
call. Cummy had promptly flung the impostor
leech into a fiery grave, rung for help, and
despatched a messenger hot-foot to fetch the
doctor. Lew, she said, bawled loudly for his
nurse, but she on this one occasion let him bawl,
for she feared that his mother was going to slip
away from them. Mr. Stevenson returned next
day from London, and, ' Honest man,' says
Cummy, ' he was fair put about, and as soon as
Mrs. Stevenson was in a fit state he packed
Lew and she and I off for eight months to
France.' Louis, on a visit to Mentone many
years after, sent this photograph back to Cummy.
' She will say,' he wrote, ' it 's no my Mentone,
I ken by the biggin o't ' ; for houses had sprung
up where nurse and child had strolled hand in
hand.

There is, in Cummy's parlour, a faded, old-
fashioned carte-de-visite album, pushed a little in
the background because of its shabby binding.
It is a mine of reminiscences. It has a series of
photographs of Louis from babyhood, and it is
w^orth while to sit by Cummy and turn the worn
pages and Hsten to her comments as we scrutinize
the well-known face. The first is as an infant
on his mother's knee. He has laughed and not

86

EDINBURGH DAYS

kept his head still while hilarious, and it is
blurred. All the same, in spite of cheeks bulg-
ing with fatness, there is a likeness to the Robert
Louis Stevenson we knew, the wide-apart eyes
very bright and dark, and a certain sly, humor-
ous expression funny to see on the podgy baby
when we remember it in the lean-cheeked man.
Cummy likes the next photograph of him at
twenty months old (Mrs. Stevenson dated them
all in her exact way), for it was done after she
had found her life's work and been his nurse two
months. He is chubby cheeked, but his arms —
which, after the dangerous practice of that time,
are bare — are wanting in flesh. His fat hands
are clasped, and his sleek hair is smoothed over
his big brow as he gazes with earnest eyes, with
a consequential gravity, rather incongruous in
a white-frocked, be-sashed, plump-faced chit.
Again at four he is taken, twice in one day. In
these two portraits he is dressed in very girlish
fashion, for in those days youths were not im-
mediately plunged into sailor suits. He is
wearing a hat which at first gives one the
impression that the child standing on the chair
in the full-skirted robe must be a lassie, for it
is ostrich-plumed and mushroom-shaped and
tied under his chin — the comfortable style of

87

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

hat the Queen patronizes. Altogether he is a
refreshingly quaint figure. He is dressed in a
blue merino pelisse trimmed with grey astrachan,
and an Eastern scarf with the Indian pine upon
it keeps his throat warm. ' This pelisse,' Cummy
says, pausing as she scrutinizes the picture, ' was
made of a remnant.' She mentions the shop
which w^as selling off when the bargain was
offered. It is a name which is in part extinct —
one partner's name still lives in a huge block of
building in Princes Street. To Cummy, in the
face of its Whiteley-like proportions, it is still
the shop where Lew's blue merino was bought.
She is, however, rather indignant that such a
bairn should be dressed in a remnant, however
excellent the stuff. ' Mrs. Stevenson always
bought the best, and made things last,' she said.
^ I 've seen her myself in a dress I knew was
years old looking better dressed than anybody,
for everything she had was thorough to the
linings.' Evidently cloth of gold was what
Cummy would have robed him in if she had had
her way. She did not think his father's pet
name, Smout, was fitting for her boy, and she
tells how, when ladies asked him what he was
called, the little rascal would look up with mis-
chief in his face and answer ' Smoutie.' ' Like

EDINBURGH DAYS

a name for a dog,' his admirers said indignantly,
' only a dog might be Princie, and a little Prince
you are.' Cummy quite agreed with this, but
Mr. Stevenson stuck to his original Smout. The
blue merino, remnant or not, she owns suited
her Prince well, and from under his hat he
glances up with the amused gleam that lights
up his face in his baby photograph. A com-
patriot in years who knew him as a schoolboy
and wrote of him so graphically in Temple Bar,
describes this expression which from first to last
was often on his face, yet impossible to catch on
canvas and difficult even for the quick camera :
' About the mouth and in the mirthful mocking
light of the eyes there lingered ever a ready
Autolycus roguery, that suggested sly Hermes
masquerading as a mortal. The eyes were
always genial, however gaily the lights danced
in them ; but about the mouth there was some-
thing a little tricksy and mocking, as if a spirit
that had already peeped behind the scenes of
life's pageant and more than guessed its un-
realities.'

The same day that he was immortahzed in his
girlish headgear he was taken without this com-
fortable, queenly hat. The fun in this second
photograph has died out of his face, the joke

89

ROBERT LOUIS STEV^ENSON'S

he was sniggling over had exploded. He is
staring at the no longer diverting photographer,
chubby, but serious. The next in the gallery
was taken when he was six and had begun to
shoot up into a lank boy. His hair is cropped
to a man-like shortness. Cummy needed no
longer to try and coax his fair locks into a curl
on his forehead, as was then the fashion. His
hair was fine for a boy and sleek, always lying
close to his head, for it was the hair belonging
to a delicate constitution, damp with the dews
of ill-health, and fell, when he wore it irrationally
long for a man, in limp locks, giving him a
dishevelled look. In this picture, like most
photographs done in the fifties, he is leaning on
a table. There is a reproving seriousness in his
face ; no droll conceit had crossed his mind to
bring to light that arch expression twice before
caught by the camera. His hands have lost
their baby podginess, and are nervous, long-
fingered. He has a whip in his grasp, which
falls slackly down as if toys were not in his
line, and he looks pensively ahead. Cummy
explains he is in a green poplin tunic, trimmed
with velvet. Miss Balfour says it is not green
poplin, and the velvet was scariet ; but whatever
its colour, it is a tasteful, old-fashioned dress,

90

EDINBURGH DAYS

finished at the neck by a frill of madeira work,
which is fastened under the chin by a big
w^omanish bow. Cummy goes over every detail
with lingering fondness. She draws attention to
its good style. This time it is made of no
remnant, it is cut from a pattern blouse, and
was his party frock for a winter, and its chicness
of sleeve was specially admired. He has boots
on and white stockings, which need bracing up,
for they wrinkle over the fleshless legs. * See
his bit breekies,' says Cummy, pointing to those
obsolete garments of white cotton appearing
below the short tunic. * That is tatting on them.
It was in his mother's trousseau, and real fine
tatting too.'

In all these photographs of his first years we
can see the child is decidedly the father of the
man, and we can trace from the earliest one the
face of the famed author. The eyes are land-
marks which even the disguising pufiiness of
youth cannot hide. In this album he seems to
emerge suddenly out of party frocks and white
stockings and tatting-trimmed * bit breekies *
into commonplace tweeds. Cummy is no longer
mistress of the robes to his majesty King Louis.
Her fingers can only fashion him manly shirts
and knit his stockings. There is an honesty

91

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

about these schoolboy photographs which is
assurance of truth. There is no touching up,
no flattering of plain facts in them. In each he
looks gloomily thoughtful, almost sulky, or, as
the language of the North alone can describe it,
* dour.' Perhaps he was not captivated with the
camera as of yore, when his two mothers dressed
him in all his bravery, or the chairs he sat on
may have been too conventional, and the steady-
ing prong which held his head immovable,
annoying ; for none of them is there a ghost
of the quizzical speculation which ever and
anon shone out of his eyes and lurked round
his mouth. There is a brooding glumness in
them all, which was unlike his future nature.
Maybe he already felt he had to brave these
equinoctial gales of youth, before he settled
into the groove for which he instinctively felt
he was best fitted.

There are other photographs of him on
Cummy's wall, cabinet size, which would not
fit the now out-of-date carte album. He is
there bewigged as Robert Louis Stevenson,
advocate, and there is the suspicion of a playful
dupHcity in the would-be wisdom-framed face.
There is a profile of him fresh from the Inland
Voyage, a pleasant reminiscence for those who

92

EDINBURGH DAYS

knew him at that time. His velvet coat and
flannel shirt with Byronic collar certainly look
better on paper than they did among his better-
clothed Edinburgh comrades. He has more the
look of his mother in this vignette than in any
other, except that in which, having ' solved the
great mystery,' he is lying at rest under his
nation's flag in the hall at Vailima, with his
trusty Samoan ser\^ant watching by his dead
master like some faithful dog. The first profile
was taken when he was in the heyday of such
strength as was accorded to him, and in both
the well-defined nose, the oval face recall Mrs.
Stevenson. Yet in another photograph this
* lad o' pairts ' seems to be a Stevenson, and a
very sullen one. He is standing by his father,
a boy of thirteen or so, one hand resting on the
good man's broad shoulder, the other tucked into
his pocket ; an angular boy, wanting in that
naturalness of pose which mark his photographs
when a child. Mr. Stevenson's Skye, a doormat
of a terrier such as Leech drew for Ptinch,^ is
curled up beside him. The engineer is sitting
with that reliable look of his in his firm face,
his head turned at the angle and his gaze fixed
on the same object as the thin boy's. The fore-
heads and the wide-apart eyes of father and son

93

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

are singularly alike, but Mr. Stevenson's mouth
is resolute yet tender, and below it is a deter-
mined chin, while Louis has an undecided fulness
about the lips and has lowered his head so that
he looks almost chinless. * All our other features
are made for us, but a man makes his own
mouth,' writes Oliver Wendell Holmes. Louis's
mouth in all these schoolboy photographs is un-
formed. When he merged into a velveteen
jacket and odd attire, a subtle, incredulous smile
settled on his lips, full of interrogative wonder-
ment.

There was little likeness between father and
son when the latter grew up, but that photograph
of Mr. Stevenson and Smoutie just caught an
affinity of look. Mr. Stevenson, broad of build,
square-faced, ruddy-coloured, with the strong
yet lenient compassionate lines about his firm-
shut mouth, seemed to have no relationship
with the ill-thriven, wan-faced, narrow-chested
stripling, and Louis never, even when beyond
his twenties, looked more than a boy in his
teens.

Cummy points out with doubled interest the
photographs of her laddie her mistress loved the
best. Mrs. Stevenson, with a mother's instinc-
tive pride, fancied those which made him appear

94

EDINBURGH DAYS

strongest and straightest. Because of its emaci-
ated look she disliked even the photograph of one
of the too few portraits done of him from Ufe.
The artist, Signor Nerli, while globe-trotting
visited Samoa, because he wished to see the
author who had made the coral-built island into
a peopled garden by his creative presence. The
eyes in this portrait are good. They have the
droll light in them which has a suspicion of
satirical amusement. He looks as if he were
taking a farcical survey of life, as if he agreed
with Horace Walpole, ' If the angels have any
fun in them, how we must divert them ! ' The
travesty of life when he thought over it gave
him often this almost cynical questioning expres-
sion. In this portrait, which he sat for when
very weary, there is a limp listlessness sad to see,
but painfully real. Often when looking spare
and fagged, but never complaining, this droop
of delicacy was terribly apparent. There is too
much of a sneer about the mouth. The ' tricksy
mocking ' expression Mr. Baildon mentions exactly
describes this doubting, incredulous look. Still
it is a good likeness, and many who knew Robert
Louis Stevenson in his Edinburgh days remarked
how it recalled him to their minds. The best
likeness of Louis, in my opinion, is in the Edin-

95

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

burgh Edition, volume xxi., * from an original
kindly furnished by Mr. John S. Sargent, A.R.A.,
a platinotype enlargement from a roughly printed
little amateur photograph taken by Mr. Llo^'d
Osboume in 1885.' The long oval face is there
full front, and he is looking up with those
strangely wide-set eyes of his, as if pausing a
moment in thoughtful doubt, pen in hand,
before he jots down for us some craftily worded
obser^-ation, the very prospect of which is bring-
ing a smile to his lips. The interrogatory but
satisfied and bright look in the eyes is altogether
life-like. There is a good likeness of him in the
frontispiece of Vail Una Letters, etched by W.
Strang, after a photograph by Falk of Sydney,
but to my thinking the eyes in it are too round.
Louis had eyes peculiar in form. They were
long, Japanese, almond-shaped. People who
have been laughing sometimes half-shut their
eyes, and Louis's gave one the impression of
eyes half-closed and beaming with fun from
their depths. * The old pythoness ' he speaks
of, who told him his fortune, stopped in her
soothsaying, and looking at him exclaimed,
' Black eyes ! ' This, he said, was not true, but
they were so dark as to be easily classed as

black. They were never sad, always radiant and

96

EDINBURGH DAYS

genial, as if brimful of life and sunshine. Judg-
ing by the numerous photographs of him, begin-
ning from babyhood, he was constantly before
the camera's recording eye, though he seldom
sat to be immortalized on canvas.

Besides photographs of him in abundance in
Cummy's room, there is a line of his books
shoulder to shoulder on her shelf.^ She has a
book-case at the end of her parlour, where many
volumes ousted from drawing-room favour, when
their outward gayness faded, and others given
her at Christmas, have now retired. Those on
the topmost shelf were all given to her by the
author, beginning with what Mrs. Stevenson used
to call her eldest grandson, namely a copy of
An Inland Voyage. In Cummy's copy, written
in a clear hand on its ribbed pages, is a private
foreword in prose of what was to appear later in
the Garden of Verses,

' My dear Cummy, —

* If you had not taken so much trouble with
me all the days of my childhood, this little book
would never have been written. Many a long
night you sat up with me when I was ill. I wish
I could hope, by way of return, to amuse a single

» Some of these she lately parted with.
O 97

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

evening for you with my little book ! But what-
ever you may think of it, I know you will con-
tinue to think kindly of

' The Author.'

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes comes
next — ' To Alison Cunningham, from the
Author.' The Garden of Verses has its envied
dedication in print, but on her own copy is
' Alison Cunningham, Bournemouth, 1885,
R. L. S.' Others follow. Kidnapped, Under-
woods, etc., all to Cummy from ' her boy, the
Author,' or ' her laddie, R. L. S.' None have so
precisely written an inscription as An Inland
Voyage. Like an only child or a first-born,
overweening care had been bestowed upon it,
and Louis's writing there is a model of prim
exactness.

Last on the row comes the posthumous Weir
of Hermiston, and on its title-page, in Mrs.
Stevenson's writing, is ' To AHson Cunningham,
in memoriam, Robert Louis Stevenson, from his
mother.' Every one of his books sent by him-
self, Cummy had. She lent them to friends,
and, as is too often the fate with loaned books,
she lost them. Over these volumes, these photo-
graphs, some old letters, his baby caps worked

98

EDINBURGH DAYS

by his mother, Mrs. Stevenson and she used to
gloat with full hearts, Cummy's eyes glistening
with tears, Mrs. Stevenson composed and cheer-
ful. Cummy has letters her mistress wrote to
her when she went back for her holidays or to
nurse some of her sick kin at Torr>^burn. Mrs.
Stevenson was a faithful amanuensis. She wrote
down all Louis's babble, all his messages to
Cummy, while, like the guinea fowls he was
likened to later, he kept crying perpetually,
' Come back, come back.' He knew by her
word pictures (for Cummy, like her mistress, has
the art of sketching people and scenes) every
one at Torrybum — a place he longed to visit
with his ' Comely Cummy,' as he called her.
At the end of one letter he signs himself, * Your
loving Robert Louis Stevenson,' but fearing this
then seldom used title sounded stiff and estranged,
he ordered his mother between the ' loving ' and
his baptismal name to insert ' little son,' know-
ing these two short words would insure his
adopted mother's return. She has his hair in
an envelope beside these letters written from
Howard Place, and many stray memorials of her
laddie. A little red velvet Testament he gave
his mother on her birthday lies on Cummy's
table. He had borrowed two shillings from

99

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Cummy for its purchase, and together they chose
it in gay scarlet and gold binding. Cummy
wrote his inscription in it, and for many a year
' Little Lew's Mamma * used it.

Cummy still wears crape on her dress for her
nursling — not ornamental sorrow, for his mother
and she wore their hearts upon their sleeves, and
he who ran might read engraven thereon the
name of their mutual little son Louis. This
crape Cummy will now never remove. She told
her mistress, on the last visit she paid her, that
she had worn it over two years for her son.
* Don't take it off, Cummy,' replied his mother,
touching it gently. Cummy has a hospitable
fashion of coming to the door to speed a part-
ing guest, watching them along the street, ready
to give an answering wave if they turn ; but
when her old mistress, grown by reason of long
acquaintance with a mutual love and mutual
sorrow into her best beloved confidante, came to
leave, Cummy always accompanied her to the
tramway car, loath to part with the friend of
forty-four years' standing. Mrs. Stevenson kissed
Cummy's sad, perturbed face, bade her go home
and not catch cold, and Alison Cunningham
stood looking lingeringly after her, till she turned
and kissed her hand and waved to her a re-

100

EDINBURGH DAYS

assuring farewell from the tramcar step. She
was always ' wae ' when her mistress left, but
that day little thought she would not meet her
again. Cummy enviously thinks of her meet-
ing with her laddie, but, drying her tears, she
smilingly adds, ' It 's not for long we '11 be parted
now.'

toi

INFANT DAYS

ICX3

' The course of our education is answered best by these poems
and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere
of thought and meet generous and pious characters.'

— Books which have Influenced Me.

104

CHAPTER V

INFANT DAYS

Louis Stevenson may well be considered a
fortunate boy with his judicious father and
mother and that other ' angel of his infant life
who made his childish days rejoice.' He was
hedged round by love and care. He had always,
at least, one of his two mothers to entertain
him or to be an eager listener to all the queer
questions and thoughts which so throbbed in
his brain. His guardians had many tales to
tell of their charge. He held despotic sway,
they firmly believed their king could do no
wrong, but from all facts gleaned he must have
been a well-behaved, seldom a troublesome little
chap.

If he had not been gifted with health, he had
an inheritance which helped to balance the loss —
contentment. Sweet content and a zest in life
helped him thoroughly to appreciate the nursery
clime, even though he had to spend long months
in the Land of Counterpane. Weary months

105

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

they would have been to many, but looking back
on them with those searching eyes of his he could
truly call them * pleasant.' The cheerfulness and
patience of his two mothers flooded the dawn of
his life with sunshine, and the remembrance of
these palmy days was ever delectable to him, for
as Sydney Smith says, * If you make children
happy, you will make them happy twenty years
after by the memory of it.*

One of his earliest recorded desires was to
write. Wlien a petticoated boy, between three
and four, he slid his hand into his nurse's,
signalled to her to lock the door, put his finger
to his lips to enjoin secrecy, and then whispered
as loud as a stage conspirator, * I 've got a story
to tell, Cummy — you write it.' * He just
havered,' says Cummy, smiling at the recollec-
tion of the young author, whose eyes glowed so
darkly in contrast with his then childishly yellow
hair. Cummy entered sympathetically into the
conspiracy, and with barred doors the maker of
tales dictated. * I wrote down every word he
told me,' says his amanuensis. * It pleased the
bairn, and when he was asleep I read his havers
to his mamma by the nursery fire.' These in-
fantile productions were all destroyed, but at six
he wrote a history which still survives. His

1 06

EDINBURGH DAYS

uncle, David Stevenson, offered a prize, open to
all the junior members of the family, for the
best essay on Moses. Louis was all agog to
compete. ' But I can't write,' he cried in sudden
despair. ' You can dictate, and I will write,*
said his mother ; * and not one word will be put
down but what you say, just as I write letters
for you.' The child, flushed with excitement,
set to work on this his first real composition.
These were the days when he wore the green
poplin tunic, and a pretty scene it must have
been, his fair young mother patiently waiting
till he had shaped all his conception of Moses
into sentences. To sit still was always foreign
to his mercurial nature, and when but six he
composed acting all the time the scenes and
characters. He drew childishly funny illus-
trations of the Israelites crossing the Red
Sea, carrying very unwieldy portmanteaus, and
smoking cigars of prodigious size. Despite the
illustrations he did not win the prize. As a
small boy his inclinations seemed to lean more
towards drama than literature. He liked to see
his puppets move. Paper puppets they were, but
cut in human shape, and made to converse
according to his fancy. A Penny Plain and

Twopence Coloured tells of these ' kaleidoscopes

107

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

of changing pictures ' he so enjoyed. His pen,
like a wizard's wand, transports us to the en-
chanted past, to that Golden Age and brings us
within ken again of childhood's age of illusion.

During one winter when he was house-bound
he had a Stevenson cousin to bear him company.
They started a game of ' islands.' Robert Louis's
was ' Noseingdale,' Robert Alan's ' Encyclo-
pedia.' Great doings there were in these lands.
Foreign foes invaded them, and the islanders in
turn attacked other kingdoms. The two Roberts
vied with one another in inventing the most
electrifying or grisly news, or finding the strangest
monster on their property. R. L. Stevenson had
in his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, one whose
creative power bid fair to eclipse his own. So
Louis had to cudgel his brains to keep Noseing-
dale on a level with Encyclopedia.

Regiments of soldiers, when an invasion was
imminent, were dispatched by a friendly power
to assist Encyclopedia, and passed on the way
battalions bound for Noseingdale. Noah's Arks,
which had been cashiered as childish, were ran-
sacked and gave up antediluvian monsters to
prey on the inhabitants. Balloons, long before
St. Ives had to look on high for means of escape,
rescued Robert Louis Stevenson's heroes from

io8

EDINBURGH DAYS

bewildering dilemmas on his * supposed ' isle.
WTien not actively engaged, round the nursery
table, in making earthquakes or volcanoes shake
the islands to their foundation or in repelling the
assault of the numerous foes which warred against
them, the boys drew pictures of what went on
on their sorely afflicted dreamland properties.
Islands always had a fascination for Louis Steven-
son. They were so handy for an ambush or a
pillaging ground for pirates. It is a pity that
a few copies of The Eyicyclopedia Budget or Nose-
ingdale Daily News were not preserved. There
was not a dull day spent by the rival islanders,
for their rulers kept them in a red-hot ferment
between subterranean upheavals, bloody battles,
dragons, and revolutions requiring martial inter-
ference.

Indeed, to their creators and the creators'
guardians they were Treasure Islands, for the in-
calculable amusement they afforded was worth
a mint of money w^hen chimney-comer days
were the doctor's orders. This kindred spirit,
Robert Alan, was the cousin alluded to who,
when he grew up, developed the same objection
to the strait waistcoat of convention as Louis did,
and proved that the latter took his uncontrollable

Bohemianism from the seemingly staid Steven-

109

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

sons. They were well matched as boys, having
both a rich gift of imagination. In Child Play
Louis mentions how he used to bury his por-
ridge under sugar and pretend it was a land
smothered under snow, while Bob submerged his
bicker of meal under milk, while they exchanged
views as to how the blizzard or the inundation
progressed. Such proceedings seasoned plain fare
into an appetising banquet.

Louis certainly had one great advantage in
the springtime of his life ; for, to use his own
expression, he had been ' young in youth.*
When years had winged their flight, he could
recall every detail of his childish play, and not
only that, but so indelibly was it engraved on
his tenacious memory, so dexterous his pen,
that he was able to wake in his readers the long-
forgotten charm, the queer imaginings of their
nursery days. While Cummy or his mother read,
he always pranced about, for he marvelled how
his elders could calmly sit and retail adventures.
He had to make the chairs into heroes, the coal-
box into a castle which held the captives, the
table into an enchanted island which was reached
in an inverted stool, the rocking-chair into the
horse which galloped madly with him to bear
news of battle. He had always to enact a fight,

no

EDINBURGH DAYS

with a pillow for his adversary, or storm a sup-
posed citadel, and personally lead the van.
When he stood breathless brushing his hair
back from his overheated brow, Cummy looked
anxiously on her agitated laddie and begged of
him to * Sit down and bide quiet for a bittie.'
She would rack her brains to find some story not
needing much action on the part of the hero, or
coax him to knit a garter which he remembered
grimed with the age it attained while growing
under his 'prentice hand.

Some cousins of his have not forgotten how,
when this only child came to play with them,
his brain fomenting with unexpressed ideas, he
at once set to work to utilize their nursery full
of children, for to have other small people to
make believe with was a fine chance of fun for
him. He drilled them into opposing armies. He
transformed them into pirates or moss-troopers,
and from one pursuit to another his nimble im-
agination flew, and he made them execute his
designs while he staged his properties. He left
his companions exhausted by the many parts
they had played, while he yet saw possibilities
for another live scenic display. He continued
to expound his plot volubly, his ashen cheeks
rosy, until he was waylaid by Cummy, who con-

m

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

veyed the excited child home, dreading lest he
should pay the penalty for this over-exertion by
a sleepless night.

WTien the last embers died from the sunset,
if Louis were not in bed he peered into the
wintry gloaming, waiting for the lamplighter.
As Louis watched ' for the term of his twilight
diligence,' when he had knocked ' another lumin-
ous hole in the dusk,' like many another in the
city he repeated the old doggerel jingle which
helped the genius of the Lamp on his way,
beginning — * Leerie, Leeric, light the lamp.'
Louis, in the Garden of Verses, tells us he con-
siders his father's house is happily situated, for
he boasts he had ' a lamp before his door.' WTien
that home light was lit the child rattled on the
pane, or if he caught the man's eye kissed his
hand to him. Louis went through paroxysms
of apprehension for fear that the man of light
would forget the white-faced watcher who longed
to salute him, for he pathetically begs, —

* And O ! before you hurry by with ladder and with
light,
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night ! '

Louis quickly learned to recite, and knew the
metrical psalms and his Shorter Catechism sooner

112

EDINBURGH DAYS

than most. He tells how he repeated ' I to the
hills will lift mine eyes ' to his grandfather,
hoping with one of those serio-comic aspirations
of childhood that the good divine would award
him an Indian picture on which his eyes had
been covetously cast. Anything pronouncedly
gay in colour fixed the attention of the boy,
whose eyes dancing with light seemed to have
absorbed the benediction of the sun. * Nothing
was more unlikely than that my grandfather
should strip himself of one of those pictures,
love-gifts and reminders of his absent sons,*
says Louis, recalling this scene. Something in
the lad's demeanour touched his kinsman, and
breaking through his usual reserve, he took the
little fellow up and kissed him. It speaks well
for young Louis's responsiveness of heart that,
forgetting his disappointment about the gaudy-
coloured picture, he was ' struck by this recep-
tion into so tender a surprise that I forgot my
disappointment.'

The twenty-third Psalm gave him food for
play, and he had his own localities in which to
see and enact it. The pastures green he decided
were some fields bordering a road near Howard
Place, known as Puddocky. The Water of Leith
running below a bridge forms a deep pool over-

H 113

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

hung by some willows. Seagulls go there and
float, on the hea\'y still days preceding a storm,
white creamy dots on the chocolate-coloured
water. There were sheep in those willow-fringed
fields awaiting the butcher's knife. These were
to Louis the flocks which the good shepherd
tended. ' Death's dark vale ' for him was also
on this road. It was a tunnel below a railway
bridge, and has to be passed through before
Warriston Cemetery is reached. Surrounded by
graves, a few stunted pines like hearse plumes
hiding the bank, the dank, drippy tunnel is
rather a fearsome passage for children to face.
Louis, however, with a tall rod in one hand and
a crook-headed staff in the other, stepped boldly
through this lugubrious entrance, but he liked,
all the same, to hear Cummy's steps behind him.
He rejoiced when he got out into the full light,
and supported by the staff (Cummy carr>^ing the
improvised rod till the return journey) he marched
along * fearing none ill.' He played through life
on the skirts of death. About the verge of the
valley of the shadow his feeble steps seemed
always to hover, but he looked down into the
unfathomed depths smilingly and inquisitively.
His rod and staff throughout his life was a
readiness to meet his fate with lips and eyes
"4

EDINBURGH DAYS

full of hopeful sunlight. In his last Evensong
he says he understands —

' So far have I been led, Lord, by Thy will ;
So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.

*****
The night at Thy command comes.
I will eat and sleep and will not question more.'

* " Be good yourself, make others happy," was,'
his mother said, writing those lines of his on a quilt,
' the gospel according to Robert Louis Stevenson.'

Along with the psalms Cummy drilled into
him the Shorter Catechism. The questions and
answers learned by rote remained firmly im-
planted in his mind, as they do in that of every
Scot who had learned it in youth. But Louis,
meditative and inquisitive, must have puzzled
his green brains over the meanings of these well-
planned sentences he learned with parrot-like
exactness. Cummy told me she read to him
M'Cheyne ; * just bits he 'd understand, you
know.' Her laddie mentions this M'Cheyne
without much respect. He had evidently too
much of this author on the strictly kept Sabbath,
which he says made a * grim and serviceable
pause in the tenor of Scotch boyhood days of
great stillness and solitude for the rebellious
mind, when in the dearth of books and play,

"5

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

and in the intervals of studying the Shorter
Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon
and test each other.' He preferred the Pilgrim's
Progress and its woodcuts, and tales from Fox's
Book of Martyrs, of those who were loyal to death
to ' Christ's ain kirk and covenant.' Cummy
thinks she read the Bible three or four times
through to him before he could read, so with
his keen memory- he must have started life
mighty in the Scriptures. Some passages as a
child fastened on his memor>\ The words,
' The only son of his mother, and she was a
widow,' he kept murmuring, var^'ing the intona-
tions of pity he threw into his voice. Joseph
and his brethren was a story^ he liked to re-tell,
and Cummy writes : * With a very^ serious face
he would repeat the stor>^ of the Shunammite
in 2 Kings iv. The twenty-fourth verse he used
to dwell on with great emphasis, especially the
middle clause to end of verse.' The fifty-eighth
of Isaiah, his nurse informed me, was * Lew's
chapter ' ; and when he had acquired the mastery
of print, he read it to her. ' I think I hear him
yet,' she says. It was a curious chapter to fix a
child's attention. There is, however, in the sixth,
seventh, and eighth verses the rough outline of
the ' gospel according to Robert Louis Stevenson,'

1x6

EDINBURGH DAYS

as his mother said, or rather the gospel as prac-
tised by him. Cummy tells how when, after his
marriage, ' her laddie ' was spending a summer at
Pitlochrie, he rushed out on a man who was
unmercifully beating a dog. * It 's no yours, is
it ? ' said the owner. * No, but it 's God's dog,
and I won't have it beaten,' repHed Louis, remem-
bering * the part he had chosen,' * to loose the
bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free.'

Certainly, between his two mothers and the
family theologian, he was what in Scotland would
have been called * weel brocht up,' which included
a thorough grounding of Presbyterian precepts.
Those who knew him in after years, kicking
violently against the pricks of civilization, scoffing
at the dogmatism in every creed, especially of the
one he had been reared in, could hardly have
pictured the strictness of his up-bringing. When
he was far away from the old land, waves of re-
collections of the teachings he received in his
youth came surging over him. With Thackeray
he could say : —

* If in time of sacred youth

We learned at home to love and pray,
Pray Heaven that early Love and Truth
May never wholly pass away.'

117

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

His father we know preached a capital lay-
man's sermon. His son preached a Christmas
one, and with him example also went before
precept. ' Kind deeds and words — that 's the
true blue piety ; to hope the best, and do the
best, and speak the best,' wrote Louis. Cheer-
fulness was another doctrine he believed in.
' Give us to go blithely on our business,* he
prayed of a morning. * Help us to play the
man ; help us to perform the petty round of
irritating concerns and duties with laughter
and kind faces ; let cheerfulness abound with
industry.'

The land of stor>'-books was to him in child-
hood his favourite pleasure-ground. Through
the sleepless nights, the days in bed, when he
had his toys about him, and sent his leaden
army marching among the bed-clothes, ' through
the hills,* and his fleets ' all up and down among
the sheets,' he liked to be read to. ' Cummy,
read to me from the Bible,' he would order when
he could not sleep, and Cummy obeyed, till rest
came to him. In the morning when he awoke
he would again issue his standing order : ' Read
to me, Cummy.' His nurse, knowing well that
his fears, with the shadows of night, had flown
away, and the ' Old, old story ' would be laid

Ii8

EDINBURGH DAYS

aside till he again traversed the ' uneven land,'
would ask with well-pretended ignorance, ' WTiat
chapter will I read to you, my laddie ? ' But
his fears dispelled by the rising sun, Louis no
longer a saint would be, and with the uncanting
honesty of tender years, answered, ' Why,
Cummy, it 's daylight now ; put away the
Bible, and reach over for that new book of
Ballantyne's.' He speaks of some of the magni-
fied, often unspoken, fears of childhood. ' We
no longer see the devil in the bed-curtains, nor
lie awake to listen to the wind.' These are
compensations for the shades of the prison-
house closing in on him. Cared for as he was,
bogles, darkness, the fears of traversing the north-
west passage, terrified him— the highly-strung
child, full of emotions. Cummy found him one
night, when beset with fears, kneeling, praying
for the Holy Ghost to come and comfort him,
and finding his qualms not allayed, he bitterly
complained that no ' peace of God ' came at his
asking to soothe his fevered frame. He liked,
as a child, the ' rare and welcome silence of the
snows.' Cummy would Hft him up out of bed,
and draw aside the bHnd to show him the world
in white.

But when the spring days came, his playground

119

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

was oftener the manse garden than the nursery.
His mother liked to see him running in the
garden she had romped in, and showed him
where to secrete himself, or hunted for him when
he was a wee four-year-old hider in the French
merino pelisse. He w^ould snicker with sup-
pressed delight when Mrs. Stevenson and Cummy
went peering about, and never saw the obviously
hidden child till he rushed out at them, jubilant
at his successful deception. * These days were
like green spots in my memory,' says Cummy,
thinking of him singing by the water door, * How
far is it to Babylon ? ' Having transformed the
garden into every conceivable land recorded in
the atlas or fair>'-books, hob-nobbed with Bruce
and Tell and Ali Baba, he and his two friends,
after a thousand-mile gallop, for the finish of the
day, at

' Last drew rein — a weary three —
Upon the lawn in time for tea,
And from our steeds alighted down
Before the gates of Babylon.'

Mrs. Stevenson and Cummy going over these
times, talking of Smoutie at the manse, remem-
bered not the sad but only the happy days of
yore, when they hoped little Lew was going to
grow up well and strong. But whether he was

I20

EDINBURGH DAYS

condemned to the Land of Counterpane, on
chimney-corner days or garden days, he saw
something bright in all.

* The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings,'

he sang. He was petted, not spoilt. He lived
in a world of admiration, and he imagined every
one, like his home circle, was his bounden slave.
He liked playing chieftain in Samoa. He was
lord of all he surveyed in Howard Place ; his
words listened to, his whims pandered to. He
was an uncommonly happy-natured, happy-
starred small boy.

121

SCHOOLDAYS

123

' Give me again all that was there ;
Give me the sun that shone ;
Give me the eyes, give me the soul
Give me the lad that's gone.
♦ * ♦ ♦

Glory of youth glowed in his soul.
Where is that glory now?'

— Son^s of Travel.

124

CHAPTER VI

SCHOOLDAYS

Louis began his schooldays when he was eight.
While still in tunics, more on account of a notion
of his own than from any wish of the rulers of
his infant days to push him on, he thirsted to go
to school. He looked out of his window and saw
the little lads and lasses trotting home from
lessons, ver>^ purposeful in their gait, or romping
and merr}\ He wistfully eyed them, begged to
join their ranks, to run along with a satchel of
books, or drive four-in-hand teams of cravat-
harnessed fellow-scholars home before him. His
entrance as a pupil at Mr. Henderson's prepara-
tory school, which was then near to Louis's
second home. No. i Inverleith Place, was delayed
till he had grown out of his green popUn tunic,
and both the Stevensons and Mr. Henderson
had moved uphill nearer Princes Street. Louis
had lived three years at Howard Place, and four
at its opposite neighbour ; then 17 Heriot Row
became his fixed Edinburgh abode. Shortly after

125

ROEERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

settling there he had an attack of gastric fever.
There is an autobiographic gHmpse of this illness
in one of his poems, * The Sick Child.' The
fevered boy, tossing restlessly, begs assurance
from his mother that the looming shapes seen
by his delirious eye do not mean him ill. The
mother, hiding her anxiety, explains to him the
darkness will not harm him, for there are

' Nothing but lamps the whole town through,
And never a child awake but you.'

How often then did Mrs. Stevenson gladly hail
the first glimmer of dawn when her vigil ended.
Knowing that soon the sun must shine blue on
the window blind, she tells her son, —

' Out in the city sounds begin ;
Thank the kind God the carts come in ;
Then shall my child go sweetly asleep,
And dream of the birds and the hills of sheep.'

In Nuits Blanches y an early paper, he again re-
calls that weary time : * If any one should know
the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly
child that woke from his few hours' slumber
with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to
lie awake, and listen, and long for the first signs
of life among the silent streets. Over the black

belt of the garden I saw the long line of Queen
126

EDINBURGH DAYS

Street, with here and there a lighted window.
How often my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered
together if, there also, there were children that
could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited, like us, for the morn-
ing. It was my custom, as the hours dragged
on, to repeat the question, " When will the carts
come in ? " and repeat it again and again. The
road before our house is a great thoroughfare for
early carts. I know not, and I never have
known, what they carry, whence they come, or
whither they go. But I know that, long ere
dawn and for hours together, they stream con-
tinuously past. It was not for nothing they
made the burthen of my wishes all night through.
They were really the first throbbings of life, the
harbingers of day. You can hear the carters
cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their
horses, or to one another ; and sometimes even
a peal of healthy, harsh, horse laughter comes
up to you through the darkness. There is now
an end to mystery and fear.'

This illness withheld him from being enrolled
as one of Mr. Henderson's pupils, but eventually
he was strong enough, and like many another

Edinburgh citizen, eminent to-day, he was well

127

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

grounded there. India Street was very close to
Heriot Row, but Louis's uncertain health kept
him from continuous attendance. Near as this
seminary for small boys and girls was to his
doors, the regularity of the routine began to gall
the young student before the corners of his
multiplication card were well dog-eared, and the
newness gone from his neatly covered primers.
He never took a prominent place in his classes,
or Cummy would have had an array of his prizes
on her shelves to-day, arrayed beside a book
Mrs. Stevenson won at school. Louis followed
on his good father's lines, and studied only what
he liked, worked only in his own way. Cummy 's
constant Bible readings (and the long night
watches gave ample time for such) must of them-
selves have been a liberal education. Making
his paper puppets act, inventing deedful days on
Noseingdale, and having stories read to him,
filled up his winter schooldays more than regular
lessons. The fancy for school quickly palled.
He found he could not romp as his sturdy
comrades did, and they refused to be drilled
into highwaymen or Indians as he wished. Then,
near as school was, he had to go tied to Cummy's
apron-strings, for if it w^ere wet or cold she
* changed his feet,* as she said, for fear of a

128

^^^^^^^^^^^- ».-^..5^-

EDINBURGH DAYS

chill. The others, with the candid cruelty of
children, jeered at their molly-coddled com-
panion, jeers which stung the thin-skinned Louis
severely. His conversation, which amused his
elders and later his contemporaries, was not con-
genial to his small schoolmates. The gilt was
soon rubbed off the delights of school.

But a good mother is the best of teachers,
and he, having two at his disposal, stowed away
a deal of knowledge. The books Cummy read
him she says she, too, enjoyed heartily. She
had a leaning to Ballantyne, in preference to
Cooper or Mayne Reid. He had a reader in
sympathy with his taste, for his slave loved her
task.

He rubbed against other young folk in the
manse garden, but like his schoolmates they were
not to his mind. He was too rashly eager to
win his spurs when playing ' French and English,'
too eager to dash over the boundary to gain
loot or rescue a prisoner. His physical strength
was not equal to the tasks he set himself, and
he was captured by the enemy and upbraided
across the border by his countrymen for headlong
stupidity. The other boys were too rude and
hardy for Louis. He Uked better to watch ' the
gardener at his toil,' or play with girl cousins,

I 129

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

who were diverted with the frail child, and found
his polite, considerate manners a pleasing change.
In the manse garden he was hero, patriot or
robber, till, wearied of play, he sauntered off
to listen to the moil of the mill. Summer and
Colinton were synonymous to him. But the
' herd of men ' ended his duties, and the manse
sheltered a stranger race, so the Stevensons spent
some summers at the seaside, where Louis went

* Crusoeing ' — a word, he says, * which covers
all extempore eating in the open air.' North
Berwick was then not so villafied a place as now,
and he wandered around tasting of an adventur-
ous gean, whose hardihood to grow on the salt-
encrusted cliffs in the teeth of searching winds
commanded his respect. He lunched at Tantallon
on ' sandwiches and visions ' — visions of Marmion
or Douglas in that hold. His cousin tells that

* games of pirates played in the open were a
constant source of amusement among the sand
wreaths to the west of North Berwick, where
we were wont to play together, and the explora-
tion of old castles and ruins was one of his
greatest pleasures.'

Another year he spent an autumn at Peebles.

Though frail of frame he was full of spirit, and

many romantic and historic scenes he imagined,
130

EDINBURGH DAYS

and was fain, when strength and chance allowed,
to enact. At Peebles Louis had a pony, and his
two companions were also mounted. He chris-
tened their steeds in rather a startUng manner.
The girl's snow-white palfrey, a safe mount fitted
to carry a somewhat timid rider, was Heaven.
Her brother's black steed was Hell ; and his
own, being a midway colour, was Purgator>\
The boys loved to ford the Tweed, and were
always choosing roads which led them across
the river. No sooner were they over, than
despite the protests of Heaven's rider, they would
change their route and return by the watery way.
Some days Louis bade them assume they were
moss-troopers out a-rieving, and every flock of
sheep they met doucely coming from market,
they uproariously hailed as their spoil. Other
times they played at being pursued by the
English, and were forced to fly full speed for the
shelter of their own peel tower. Louis foresaw
an ambush in every broomy scaur which had to
be dashed past. Heaven, who disliked this
erratic pace, lagged, and forthwith became a
wounded comrade, whom chivalry forbade them
to desert. The boys loved to gallop through the
toll bars, pretending they were running a block-
ade ; but the girl, being of a law-abiding nature,

131

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

was anxious to pay tax, and soothed the toll-
keeper's wrath, as he shook his fist at the black
and brown pony riders, jeering at his defeat.
When, wearied of being caterans, or the stragglers
from that fatal Flodden, they raced along the
Queen's highway, Louis shouted, ' Hell wins, I
say ; don't hold Heaven in, you stupid. No ; I
believe Purgatory will beat you both.* The
visitors that summer at Peebles must have often
met this capering trio, led by the spare-framed
boy on the brown, who, with face inflamed by
excitement, resurrected many a bygone borderer,
and fought their battles over again.

In winter he found much to explore round his
native city. Craigleith quarry, within a mile
of Edinburgh town, attracted him on holidays,
for its hillocks tufted with gorse, the green water
far in the abyss, made fine exploring ground.
Then the * stones chattered to him,* and told him
tales of long ago — of villages now swept away,
or a house with old trees around it, wedged into
a street, was a story to him. Many a red-tiled
* nugget of cottages,* spared by the encroaching
town, did Louis discover when he was a school-
boy. * The memories of an Edinburgh boy are
partly the memories of the town. I look back,*
he says, * with deUght on many an escalade of

132

EDINBURGH DAYS

garden walls, many a ramble among lilacs full
of piping birds, many an exploration in obscure
quarters that were neither town nor country ;
and I think that both for my companions and
myself there was a special interest, a point of
romance and a sentiment of foreign travel
when we hit in our excursions on the butt end
of some former hamlet, and found a few
rustic cottages embedded among streets and
squares.'

He was eight or more before he took to reading
to himself. With a slave at command to read
when he wished, he had no need to hurr>^ him-
self to learn, precocious as he was at mastering
words in print. But the thirst for knowledge
was strong within him. His constant cry was,
' Tell me more.' Cummy ransacked her brains
for further tales from out the storied past where-
with to amuse him. Louis's wife wrote Alison
Cunningham lately that Louis had told her he
liked his nurse's narrations more than any book
she read to him. But his appetite was insatiable,
and he was often baffled by being told, in answer
to questions, that when he grew clever he would
read for himself and find out. The spirit of
inquiry strong within him spurred the lagging
schoolboy on. One evening ' of heavenly sweet-

133

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

ness,* deserted by his companion with whom he
had been building sand castles, he went at sun-
set among the firs, a book of fairy tales in his
hand, and began to read to himself as he strolled.
Then, he says, he knew he loved reading.
Cummy's favourite, M'Cheyne, was left in the
lurch. He found his mother had been educating
his taste, and, though his father's library was a
place of ' some austerity,' he found there life-
long friends. Four old volumes of Punch he
revelled in, and he was astonished to find in
after-life that the ' Snob Papers * were written
by big Mr. Thackeray, and not by the hook-
nosed, deformed humorist, Mr. Punch. He also
tasted of the Master of Romance's Guy Manner-
ing and Rob Roy, and new worlds of entertain-
ment opened up. The Arabian Nights he read,
he says, 'in the fat, old, double-columned vol-
umes with the prints. I was just well into the
story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my
clergyman grandfather (a man we counted
pretty stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind
with terror ; but instead of ordering the book
away he said he envied me. Ah ! well he
might ! '

During his tedious convalescence after the
fever he consumed a deal of literature. He was
134

EDINBURGH DAYS

read to, of course. ' I listened for news of the
great, vacant world, upon whose edge I stood ;
I listened for delightful plots that I might re-
enact in play, and romantic scenes and circum-
stances that I might call up before me, with
closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland and
home, and that w^eary prison of the sick chamber
in which I lay so long in durance/ Robinson
Crusoe, Mayne Reid, and a book called Paul
Blake, were his favourite peeps beyond that
sunny room at Keriot Row. When he learned
to enjoy reading to himself, he was like a sheep
long pent in a small fold, turned into endless
and rich pastures to browse at will. It was then
his education really began.

In 1863 he was enrolled as an Academy boy
in one of the biggest and best Edinburgh day
schools, a junior rival to the High School where
Scott was educated. Louis was at first proud
of his advancement. The school lay down hill
from his home, and he ran off to his task, rasping
his clacken ^ on the area railings as he went, a
noisy trick he afterwards made a hero of his
indulge in. Louis's clacken was only worn by

^ The clacken is a wooden racket dear to Academy boys, and
usually carried in the other hand from their books, handy for
amusement or war.

135

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

this rasping. He did not join the outdoor pur-
suits of the boys. The playfield near by with
the green mound marking where the bow butts
had stood in days of yore saw Httle of him.
Even the yard round the school, where clackens
were put to their orthodox use in brief play
interv^als, had no attractions for him. He cared
for none of the games with which the active boys
filled their leisure, so he was little known by his
contemporaries. When he wanted exercise he
strolled alone, and as the houses spoke to him
he was not so solitary^ as he seemed. The
Academy is close to Silvermills, where Davie
Balfour met Alan Breck before they made a
dash for the sea, where they heard what Louis
himself calls that piece of living Scots— the story
of Tod Lapraik and his fiendish dance on the
Bass Rock. Silvermills once saw the precious
ore which gives it its name melted in a mill on
the humble Water of Leith, and a village sprang
up to support its workers. To Louis, who passed
by it on his schooldays, it was not an uninteresting
suburb of temporary sheds and workmen's flats,
but a little community far from the city. ' Be-
south of the mill-lade in a scrog of wood,' where
St. Stephen's church now stands, Louis's hero
and part namesake found ' the place and the
136

EDINBURGH DAYS

hour and the talking of the water infinitely
pleasant; The mill-lade, bickering and surging
busily, was often viewed by a tardy schoolboy,
and before his eyes the unsightly houses and yards
faded, and he saw it as it used to be when the
silver from ' God's Blessing ' mine was worked into
shape there. Out in Samoa he remembered what
he had conjured of its past when passing at a
dawdling pace to his studies, wondering what
the place had looked like before the old town
had become too small for Edinburghers. Quite
unconsciously then he relished the pleasure he
depicts in his Dedication to Catrmta, of follow-
ing ' among named streets and numbered houses
the country walks of David Balfour.' Some-
times, wearying of passing St. Stephen's daily,
he would go to the westernmost end of Heriot
Row and trot down Church Lane and imagine
it again a thorn-edged loaning, leading from
Stockbridge to the West Kirk. He never forgot
these talks with the past, and he could minutely
chronicle ever>^thing his eyes had lit on when a
boy. His * Misadventures of John Nicholson,'
w^hich appeared in a Christmas number, Yule
Tide, illustrates this. It owes its reappearance
in the Edinburgh edition to Mr. FouHs, of Messrs.
Douglas and Foulis, Edinburgh, who reminded

137

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

the editors of its existence. Its wonderful local
colour had made a deep impression on him.
Louis locates John Nicholson's house on the
south, the dull, side of Randolph Crescent. The
north side has a wide outlook to the Forth, but
John's dreary^ home is put in a sunless corner.
Louis did not forget the crows who built in the
crescent garden, as their ancestors had done
when their tree-top nurseries were in the wood
of Drumsheugh. In this story^ of John Nicholson
there is a murder, out at Murrayfield. Mr.
Baildon — whose recollections of Robert Louis
Stevenson as a schoolboy in Temple Bar, for
March 1895, I have already quoted — read the
story in Y^ile Tide, and identified his house as
the scene of this tragedy. Murrayfield, being
out of town, had, on Saturdays, attractions for
the schoolboys. Louis remembered it, and
painted it as it would seem on a drear}' night,
not as a happy holiday house. Mr. Baildon,
entering into correspondence with his friend, who
had then journeyed to Samoa, reminded Louis
Stevenson that he had been so unkind as to
leave a dead body in the Murrayfield dining-
room. As it was long since he and Louis had
met, he said he thought the least the author of
the crime could do by way of atonement was to

EDINBURGH DAYS

come back to Eklinburgh, not only to give them
an opportunity of renewing their intercourse,
but to give Louis the opportunity- of removing
the haunting corpse he had deposited on his
friend's hearth. This last imperative reason for
his return mightily tickled the fancy of R. L. S.
in Samoa.

One amusement Louis entered into at the
Academy. That was the starting of a school
magazine in which he had an editorial interest.
The Sunheain, as it was called, was a manu-
script magazine. If some one came across this
collection of the editor's blood and murder con-
tributions, written in his boyish hand, what a
find it would be ! Louis, as usual, when riding
a hobby, was in thorough earnest over it. The
other contributors fell off, or did not circulate
the one copy, but he stuck to it with determined
diligence. There was one number with a coloured
illustration in it, a portrait of one of his cousins
in lesson hours, his tasks pushed on one side,
blissfully ignorant of the presence of a master
who, tawse in hand, is looking over the boy's
shoulder.

Louis never took any forward place in his
classes. His health kept him a not unwilling
victim at home. Then health again sent him

139

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

and his mother abroad in the spring. Even in
summer he was irregular in his attendance, for
the family was often away from town, and Louis
found crusoeing more instructive than journeying
by an early train to school. For a short time
he was at a boarding-school near London, but
his father passing through on his way to Mentone
removed Louis, and together they journeyed to
join Mrs. Stevenson in the Riviera. Mr. Steven-
son was wont to say he preferred his son to
grow up a healthy idiot rather than a sickly
genius, so Louis's boarding-school experiences
were decidedly brief.

From 1864 to 1867 he attended a Mr. Thom-
son's school, of which Mr. Baildon, who met
Louis there, says, ' I do not think there were
at this little seminary^ more than a dozen boys,
ranging in ages from nine or ten to fourteen or
fifteen, and our intellectual calibre varied fully
as much as our years. For some of us were sent
there for reasons of health, and others because
they had not made that progress with their
studies which their fond parents had hoped.
We had no home lessons, but learned, in the
two or three hours of afternoon school, what
we were expected to remember next day.' Ill-
health, not genuine backwardness, sent Steven-

140

EDINBURGH DAYS

son there, and he was no longer burdened with

heavy tasks to study in the evening. His father

disapproved of school books and school tasks.

Mr. Thomson's plan, free of the drudgery of

home preparation, met with his approval, also

with Louis's. His friend Baildon and he found

that they had ample time to worship at the shrine

of literature. Louis had a den in the top of the

house in Heriot Row, and the two boys there

hatched plots for work. Deacon Brodie's history

had early caught Louis's fancy, and in 1864 he

showed his friend a drama he had written on it.

Louis did not desert old friends or the fancies

of his youth even on paper. Deacon Brodie

was not forgotten, and was re-written later with

Mr. Henley's collaboration. He may not have

acquired much examination-passing knowledge

at Mr. Thomson's, but there is no doubt he

learned at that period a vast deal out of school

hours. He made few friends at any of his schools.

His delicacy and his dislike of boisterous boyish

games cut him off from them. He was a soHtary

lad, but to his love of seclusion we doubtless owe

a deal, for then was the seed-time to the harvest

of ideas of which we reap the benefit. He

had travelled much in his schooldays, and he

travelled with observant eyes. Though he was

141

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

lonely, he was no recluse. Early he enticed
enjoyment out of what he called the * task of
happiness.* When among surroundings that
pleased his sunny, responsive nature, he was a
life-loving, gay-hearted lad.

142

SPRING EQUINOX

143

' Do you remember— can we e'er forget ?
How, in the coiled perplexities of youth,
In our wild climate, in our scowling town,
We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared ?'
— 'To my Old Familiars.' Songs of Travel.

^44

CHAPTER VII

SPRING EQUINOX

' At sixteen we should be men,' said Louis to
his schoolmate, Mr. Baildon, when they were
rambling together one Saturday, talking of
their futures. His comrade, looking back across
the waste of years and recollecting this boyish
statement, adds, ' He, of all mortals, who was
in a sense always a boy ! ' Ever>' one of the
readers of his * verses ' or his stories must feel
that he has awakened anew in them, even from
long-buried slumber, the charm of their child-
hood. Mr. Barrie says, * He was the spirit of
boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world
of ours and compelling it to come back and
play.' But as a lad in his teens he was more
serious of face, more troubled of spirit than when
years had winged their flight. In his school-
boy photographs this tristful puzzled look clouds
his expression. Nevertheless, as he himself said,
writing of his own experience, ' It is good to
have been young in youth, and as the years go
K 145

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

on to grow older. Many are already old before
they are through their teens ; but to travel
deliberately through one's ages is to get the
heart out of a liberal education.' The ' gloom
of youth,' when ' in the palace porch of life,' he
' huddled with chimeras from within,' was
stamped on his face. But all his sulky looks
melted away when he grew out of his teens.
Merry of soul he was, and merry of soul he
remained to the end. Wlien he wrote Treasure
Island he was a man of thirty-three — he wrote
it with a boyish zest straight from his heart.
He found, he said, when reading chapter by
chapter at Braemar to his family that his step-
son was not his only boy listener. * It seemed
to me,' he writes, with that sane critical judg-
ment of his, * as original as sin. I counted on
one boy. I found I had two in my audience.
My father caught fire at once with all the
romance and childishness of his original nature.
His own stories that every night of his life he
put himself to sleep with dealt perpetually with
ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and
commercial travellers before the era of steam.
He never finished one of these romances. He,
lucky^ man, did not require to finish them. But

in Treasure Island he recognised something
146

EDINBURGH DAYS

kindred to his own imagination, it was his kind
of picturesque, and he not only heard with
dehght the daily chapter but set himself actively
to collaborate. When the time came for Billy
Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must have
passed the better part of a day preparing on the
back of a legal envelope an inventory of its
contents, which I exactly followed, and the
name of Flint's old ship, the Walrus, was given
at his particular request.' Louis unconsciously
here pays his own powers a pretty compliment,
letting us see how his intimate knowledge of
what would please and interest a boy resurrected
in his grave father the boyishness of old. And
Mr. Stevenson was not alone in thus returning
to this second childhood. In the preface to
the translation of Treasure Island into French,
it is stated that Mr. Gladstone once returned
home from the House of Commons and, by
chance, picked up the book. He soon became
entangled in the seductive mesh of its plot,
read on to the end, and found he had lost his
night's sleep in the pursuit of Treasure. Mrs.
Barrie, we know, refused to go to rest till she
saw how the hero laddie got safe out of the
apple barrel.

Louis thoroughly enjoyed the planning and

147

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

weaving of these tales of adventure. When
young he was withheld by sickness from active
participation in stirring deeds ; but when he
was free to do as he listed, with as much ardour
in his thirties as if he were still in his teens, he
sailed among tropic Ultima Thules and tasted of
the life after which he had yearned for formerly.
But when he was finishing his schooldays in
Edinburgh, and wearying to imprint an exploring
foot on the trackless desert of his future, he was,
unhappily, depressed by the seriousness of the
art of living, which he vowed was the most
difficult of all the arts — an art for the teaching
of which no provision is made.

He had been pleased with the conversation of
his drajuatis personce in the shape of tin soldiers
and those coloured paper figures which slid on
to his mimic stage in tin grooves called spoons.
He made a toy theatre with a stage two feet deep
and nine inches high, and the soldiers were played
with round the nursery table or kept him com-
pany in bed. Their actions, when he wrote
them down, did not seem so full of vigour and
reality as they had been when first he conjured
them up in his mind. He realized then that
he could never rest until he could transfer his
thoughts into fitting words, and he was a hard

148

EDINBURGH DAYS

task-master to himself. He knew the bent of
his inclinations, but before him loomed the here-
ditary seat in his father's office. He was proud
of the work which his father and the others of
that strenuous family had accomplished, but
he felt that he was forced to flee the labours of
his sires.

' I must arise, O father, and to port
Some lost, complaining seaman pilot home,'

he sang ; but it was not by the Stevenson
works or by their beacons, piercing the dark-
ness, that he accomplished this vow. By the
flashes of his pen he lightened the way on the
sea of hfe to many. He knew he had no aptitude
for the engineer's trade. He knew this as a
boy when by the sea he saw his father, ever
thinking of his profession, ' pass hours on the
beach, brooding over the waves, counting them,
noting their least deflection, noting when they
broke. On Tweedside or by Lyne or Manor, we
have spent together whole afternoons ; to me at
the time extremely wearisome ; to him, as I am
now sorry to think, bitterly mortif>dng. The
river was to me a pretty and various spectacle ;
I could not see — I could not be made to see — it
otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board
of lively forces, which he traced from pool to

149

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

shallow with minute appreciation and enduring
interest. It was to me like school in holidays ;
but to him, until I had worn him out with my
invincible triviahty, a delight.' This * engineer's
voluminous handy book of nature ' was one
which Louis could never read. His Eastern-
looking eyes saw differently from his father's
Norse grey ones. Ever before him Tusitala saw
the office stool. The life such as his grandfather
had led in the olden days when the lighthouse
towers were being founded and their lamps first
lit was attractive enough, full of adventure, sail-
ing, riding, wreckers, and storms. But Louis
knew that his unconquerable gipsy fancy must
have its way. ' It is an evil age,' he deplores,
' for the gipsily inclined among men. He who
can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is
who has the wealth and glory.' He gave up all
thoughts of the former to avoid the ledgers and
the office ; but he, like his kinsmen, was of the
' ready and the strong of word,' and he deter-
mined to cultivate this talent of language which
lay dormant within him. He had in him, too,
the doggedness which made these kinsmen such
victorious fighters against the encroaching seas.
Mr. Baildon, who read as soon as they were
written Louis's schoolboy literary^ efforts, says,
150

EDINBURGH DAYS

* There is no sign in these early attempts of any-
thing premature or precocious, and nothing can
be truer, in spite of his early bent towards
letters, than that his success was the fruit, as
he himself alleges, of persistent industr}^ and
indefatigable perseverance.' Louis Stevenson
determined to master what he called the * kittle
art ' of writing, and as a schoolboy knew that he
had before him a sore task to mount his Hill of
Difficulty.

He had to begin his ascent in the face of
paternal discountenance. Till well up in his
teens his gipsy inclinations had been in abeyance.
He was amenable to discipline and amenable to
orthodox Edinburgh life. As a small boy he had
enjoyed being dressed by his two mothers, and
was a show child at juvenile parties, franker
than his comrades, with courteous manners,
an utter absence of Scottish gaucherie, and a
strong wish to dance and talk, and be pleased
and pleasant. Even as a schoolboy, unhke others
of his years and nation, he went to parties with
a good grace and good manners. There was no
trouble then about getting him into evening dress.
Other boys had to be threatened into velveteens
and kilts, and sulked in corners on their arrival
at the festive scene. A host of Louis's in the

15^

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Academy days remembered him as the nice boy
who came in to dance with his youngsters of an
evening, executing his steps with all the airs and
graces of a dancing master, and talking to his
elders like a sage. * The little Frenchman ' his
hostess called him, so polite was he, so gay. He
Hked fine clothes in these days, and was particular
as to his appearance, envious a little of the boys
who donned the garb of old Gaul, for he ever had
an eye for bright colour and regretted he was
too ill put together to wear a tartan kilt. He
travelled much in his boyhood, when he was
forced to follow the swallows in search of the
sun, and says his senses were alternately stunned
and quickened by the novelties he saw. He had
read and observed more than most boys of his
years, and he was free from all insular prejudices.
About the time that he went to Mr. Thomson
he began to feel that he was shut up within
the Bastille of civilization, and the sense of im-
prisonment galled him. The feel of the fetters
changed him into a sedate boy who did not care
to join other lads and lasses who played in the
gardens in front of Heriot Row. When the
thrushes and blackbirds began to sing in the
shrubberies, when back-street children, as sure
as the days lengthened, span tops, and played
152

EDINBURGH DAYS

hop-scotch on the pavement, these gardens began
to fill with young folk from Heriot Row. The
boys climbed trees and held high revels aloft,
played cricket on forbidden stretches of sward,
defied the gardener, and encouraged the girls to
follow them over the borders.

Louis never joined these neighbouring children
at their unruly sports. He noted when the flower-
ing currant and tender greening began to appear
among the dull-leaved, winter-enduring shrubs,
and listened amid the grey solemn town for ' the
premonitory^ notes of the bestirring birds,' sounds
pleasant to his ear in the silence before dawn.
He disliked the other bipeds of his own species
who played in these well-wooded, green-turfed
gardens. He disliked their noisy games. He
felt that ' shades of the prison house ' were closing
more and more oppressively in on him, and he
had no elbow-room. He was too much in leading-
strings yet to see hope of escape. He went ofT to
corners of the Princes Street gardens and rumin-
ated under the shadow of the Castle rock, where
no boys came and asked him to join in their
brawling play, or, worse still, jeered at him for
refusing, knowing he was physically unable to
cow thom into order or accept their challenge to

fight.

153

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Far away from these disturbing elements he
could talk in comfort with a rare friend, or
ponder according to his fancy, while looking
over the transformed valley. He, the ' consis-
tent idler,' had begun his literary task. * Sooner
or later,' he said at Vailima, ' somehow, anyhow,
I was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to
ask why. Men are born with various manias ;
from my earliest childhood it was mine to make
a plaything of imaginary series of events, and as
soon as I was able to write I became a good
friend of the paper-makers. Reams upon reams
must have gone to the making of Rathillet, The
Pentland Rising,^ The Kings Pardon, otherwise
Park Whitehead, Edward Daven, A Country
Dance, and A Vendetta in the West, and it is
consolatory these reams are now all ashes and
have been received again into the soil.' This
cremated Rathillet was written when he was
fifteen. Though he was then and ever after so
severe and fair a critic of his own works, his two
mothers were vastly proud of these boyish at-
tempts. His father never heeded Louis's edu-

1- ' Ne pas confondre. Not the slim green pamphlet with the
imprint of Andrew Elliot, for which (as I see with amazement
from the book lists) the gentlemen of England are wilhng to pay
fancy prices, but its predecessor, a bulky historical romance
without a spark of merit, and now deleted from the world.'

154

EDINBURGH DAYS

cation. He was well pleased that his son was
not brilliant in his classes, for he knew he was
busy in his own way. A book was his chosen
companion. Mr. Stevenson let him wander at
will through his own selected library, where
Louis says, ' the proceedings of learned societies,
some Latin divinity, encyclop^ias, physical
science, and above all, optics, held the chief
place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes
and corners that anything really legible existed
as by accident.'

Twice Mrs. Stevenson had two short pieces of
her son's printed for private circulation. She
lived to see these little booklets fetch more than
their weight in gold. A manuscript for which
he received £3, 3s. was lately unearthed and

sold for £26.

Mr. Stevenson pooh-poohed the adulation ac-
corded to the boyish author by his mother and
nurse, so when praise came from his firm-set lips,
it was all the sweeter. The Pentland Rising was
one of these immature booklets, not in reams,
but in the reduced form, which Louis mentions
in a note already quoted. The Charity Bazaar
was another. This was written for a sale of
work held in Mrs. Stevenson's drawing-room
for the benefit of some foreign mission she was

155

R0I3ERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

interested in. The booklet was sold in 1896 for
£25, A second-hand bookseller told me of this
fancy price, adding, * I don't beheve his mother
had £25 worth of work on her drawing-room
table.' I repeated this to Mrs. Stevenson, who
was astonished at the figure her book, as she
called it, fetched nowadays ; but casting her
mind back thirty years, she added, ' Indeed his
mother had more than £2^ worth of work at her
Charity Bazaar, for I remember I made £^5, not
counting Lew's book, which sold for 6d. a copy.*

In 1867 Louis's easy-going schooldays ended.
That year was a memorable one in the annals of
the Stevenson family, for it was at that time that
they bought Swanston Cottage, that favoured
spot, * a green fold in the lap of the Pentlands.'
Mrs. Stevenson and Louis found seeking health
in the South irksome. Mr. Stevenson felt de-
pressed when left alone in the grim North.
Summers had been passed at the seaside, at
Tweedside, and various haunts within range of
Edinburgh, so that the engineer might spend
week-ends with wife and son ; but such an
arrangement did not satisfy Mr. Stevenson.
He wanted a home within easy reach of that
office which his son so dreaded. Mrs. Steven-
son knew the restful quiet, the pure air, of the

156

EDINBURGH DAYS

green ridge of hills which guards Edinburgh on
the south, and which looked down into the
chimneys of the old manse at Colin ton. She
had always thriven under their sheltering shadow,
so Swanston w^as seen, liked, and bought. All
who have read St. Ives know Swanston as it was
when the Stevensons first made it their spring
and summer home — a place to go to for rest and
change even in midwinter.

Once upon a time the Edinburgh magistrates
had built a cottage at Sw^anston, a cottage to
which they might retire when worn out with the
afiFairs of the city. In Picturesque Notes Louis
tells the histor>^ of Swanston when under the rule
of the civic dignitaries. * The dell was turned
into a garden ; and on the knoll that shelters it
from the plain and the sea winds, they built
a cottage looking to the hills. They brought
crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's, which
they were then restoring, and disposed them on
the gables and over the door and about the
garden.' They planted their pleasure grounds
with trees, they swathed the house, decorated
with church quarried stones, in clematis, and the
Stevensons reaped the harvest of the long-dead
bailies' planting and building. They lived there
constantly from March to October, and in course

157

ROBEKT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

of time the old house St. Ives knew had to be
enlarged to suit more modern notions of comfort.
With its sunny frontage, its immunity from the
sweep of the scathing east winds, its nearness in
point of distance to the town, its retiredness from
all town bustle, though within sight of the city's
towers and steeples which lie like an anchored
fleet at the base of Arthur's Seat — the place suited
the Stevenson family admirably. None loved it
more than their wandering child, who by his
magical memory was enabled to retrace his ' nu-
merous footsteps ' when he willed, to see again,
from across the wide world, his Pentland home
nestling like the ewe buchts among the broom
of the Cowden-knowes * in the hrk of the hill.*

Swanston is some three miles from Ekiinburgh ;
but the houses, * the new folds of city ' that
Louis saw * glitter,' increase yearly. They have
all but invaded Shirley's Hermitage, and march-
ing over its secluded valley, are rapidly advancing
to Fairmilehead. Still even to-day Swanston so
determinedly turns its back on Edinburgh, and
looks up to the scarred brow of Caerketton, that
it refuses to see the advancing tide of the city.
The one o'clock gun from the Castle keeps the
Swanston clocks correctly timed. The nightly
bugle blown from that Castle too reaches it when

158

EDINBURGH DAYS

evenings are still, or the winds blowing in that
direction. Otherwise Swanston hears nothing of
the neighbouring town— hears only the sheep
bleating and the peewits crying, as with a swish
of wings they pass nigh the house. Sometimes
the plaintive wail of the gulls, driven inland by
stress of weather, or forced, like many an
honoured Scot, to follow at the plough's tail
to earn a meal, break in on the hillside quiet
with their husky sea voices. The old house of
Swanston, once the grange of Whitekirk Abbey,
is close to the cottage, a bleak building exposed
to the winds, for its founders sought no * lirk.*
Its nearness does not disturb its more recent
neighbour. The voices from the clachan of
cottages gathered round the older house, the
bustle of life from the farmyard, toned by
distance, sound pleasantly on the ears of those
in the garden that Robert Young tended.

Louis's books are all full of autobiographical
glimpses. We can trace whence he drew foun-
dations for a plot, backgrounds for a story.
Wandering on the uplands, hearkening to the
weird cry of the whaups, or to the wind ' austere
and pure ' whistHng in his ears as it whistles in
the shrouds of a ship at sea, the Pentlands were
to him the historic ground where the Covenanters

159

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

made their stand. His first history of them (the
one that consumed so many reams of paper) was
suggested to his mind by the monument to those
who stood by their creed, which lies between
CoHnton and Swanston, and to which, when he
was at the Old Manse, he walked. When Swan-
ston was his home his legs were longer, and
he went further afield, and so perhaps saw the
grave in the hills, ' Sacred to the Memory of a
Covenanter, who fought and was wounded at
Rullion Green, November 28th, 1666, and who
died at Oaken Bush the day after the battle,
and was buried here by Adam Sanderson, of
Blackhill.' This martyr was a westland man,
and he made his companion promise to bury him
on the ridge where through a gap in the range
there is a peep away to his well-loved Ayrshire.
The lonely hills for the lonely Louis were peopled
with the makers of history.

At Swanston he had studies for his pen before
his window. Robert, the gardener, ' was lowly,
and a peacemaker, and a serv^ant of God.' Then
the shepherd, whose bellowing commands order-
ing Louis to ' c'way out amang the sheep,' at
first hounded the youth from his snug nooks on
the braeside, till, as he says, ' I skulked in my

favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the
160

EDINBURGH DAYS

Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claver-

house, and his dogs my questing dragoons/

But the trespassing young ruralist stuck to

his haunts, and

' Wi' sober heart,
For meditation sat apairt,
When orra loves or kittle art
Perplexed my mind.'

He learned in time not to fear John Todd, and
before long the queerly assorted pair became close
friends. ' The oldest herd on the Pentland '
was full of tales of his ' curlew-scattering, sheep-
collecting life.' The student sat * weel neukit
atween the muckle Pentland knees,' with his
books, though he confesses he read little, and
listened eagerly to his whilom enemy, John Todd.
* He was,' Louis explains, * a wayfarer, and took
my gipsy fancy.' Louis owns that John and
Robert were never particularly friendly one to
another — Robert was too conventional, too even
grooved — but he would not dissociate his two
Swanston friends. In 1894 he writes from
Vailima about the Edinburgh edition : * I think
the old gardener has to stay where I put him
last. It would not do to separate John and
Robert.' These days of idle lounging on the
Pentlands, though Horace or Montaigne lay un-

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

opened beside him, were days in which, accord-
ing to Thoreau's reasoning, Louis grew. But
these growing days were in the summer-tide,
when he learned much Hstening to the shepherd's
tale under the hawthorn. There were winter
days in town, and, his schooling over, he was
entered at Edinburgh University. He describes
himself at this period as * a certain lean, ugly,
idle, unpopular student, full of changing humours,
fine occasional purposes of good, unflinching ac-
ceptance of evil, shiverings on wet east-windy
mornings, journeys up to class, infinite yawnings
during lectures, and unquestionable gusto in the
delights of truantry.*

Mr. Baildon comments on this description.
* Stevenson calls himself " ugly " in his student
days, but I think this is a term that never at any
time fitted him. In body he was assuredly badly
set up. His limbs were long, lean, and spidery,
and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest mal-
nutriment, such sharp corners did his joints
make under his clothes.' Another contemporary
student, writing in a daily paper at the time of
Stevenson's death, recalls him as * a thin, pale-
faced youth, with piercing eyes, ever in a hurry,
cigarette in mouth and muffler round his neck,
and with loose locks which suggested an advisable

163

EDINBURGH DAYS

early interview with a skilful barber.' At this
period he was perturbed, discontented, rebellious,
and as his expression was moulded by his feelings
he was not so far wrong in his verdict of * ugly.'
These were the days when he leaned on the
parapet of the North Bridge and enviously
watched the trains gliding off ' on a voyage to
brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake
off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for
the last time the cry of the east wind among
her chimney tops. And yet the place,' he adds,
' establishes an interest in people's hearts ; go
where they will, they find no city of the same
distinction ; go where they will, they take a
pride in their old home.' Remembering how he
felt, chained and trammelled in the city of his
birth, he sympathised in An Inland Voyage with
the omnibus driver at Mauberge, who ' had a
spark of something human in his soul, whose
bones thirsted all the while for travel.' Louis
had, like many, * aspired angrily after that some-
where else of the imagination where all troubles
are supposed to end.' It was at this period, too,
that he could sympathise with Ferguson, the
poet, whom he calls 'the poor white-faced,
drunken, vicious boy ... my unhappy pre-
decessor on the causey of Auld Reekie. I

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

believe Ferguson lives in me, I do. But '' tell
it not in Gath." Every man has these fanciful
superstitions coming, going, but yet enduring ;
only most men are so wise (or the poet in them so
dead) that they keep their follies for themselves.'
Stevenson, loitering at college, with the visions
of the harness of an engineer awaiting him, and
longing all the while for the collar work of litera-
ture, was in the full blast of the equinoctial gales
of youth. This spring hurricane was hard to
weather, but he steered his course out from
among the breakers in an obstinate, headstrong
way, and became, in the words of his friend Mr.

Henley —

' The master of his fate,
The captain of his soul.'

* On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to
get these words inscribed : "He clung to his
paddle," ' Louis said in his first book, An Inland
Voyage. In this watery journey, the Arethusa
had borne him gallantly down the Gise, till it
rushed below a fallen tree, and then, the canoe
absconding, like Absalom's steed, left her skipper
entangled in the branches. * Death himself had
me by the heels,' he wrote, ' for this was his last
ambuscade, and he must now personally join in
the fray. And still I clung to my paddle.' The
164

EDINBURGH DAYS

paddle with which he pHed his course in life,
with which he steered into our hearts, was in
reality his pen. He clung to it despite adverse
currents, and wielded it moreover with a boyish
gaiety of spirit which showed his heroic pluck.
* Gladly I lived,' he truly sang.

When he left school, however, he was not
allowed to use the paddle he eventually handled
so well. Wliile yet in his teens the pattern idler
was sent to view the practical part of engineering.
He certainly made an effort to give his father's
profession a trial. He went to Anstruther, where
the Stevenson firm were building a breakwater.
It was hoped that he would glean engineering
experience in this Fife village. ' What I gleaned
I am sure I don't know,' he exclaims ; ' I had
already my own private determination to be an
author ; I loved the art of words and the appear-
ances of life, and travellers, and headers, and rubble,
and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even
the thrilling question of the string course inter-
ested me only (if they interested me at all) as
properties for some possible romance, or as words
to add to my vocabulary-. ' He was most indus-
trious when off duty. Then it was that he wrote
the cremated Covenanting novel, Voces Fidelhmi,
and dialogues of a dramatic character in verse,

165

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

also committed to the flames. There was no
blunting the eager edge of Louis's curiosity, and
among his engineering experiences none pleased
him more than descending in diver's dress to the
foundation of the harbour that was being formed.
He enjoyed that submarine visit, and in Random
Memories he has given us a glimpse of what he
viewed out of the distorted-eyed helmet. During
this walk with the guide he had bribed to accom-
pany him, he swayed like a weed, and had dizzy,
muddleheaded joy in his surroundings, grabbing
at the fish which darted past him. * This ex-
perience was,' he says, * one of the best things
I got from my education as an engineer.' The
outdoor side of engineering life found favour in
his sight, but he complains that he or others
* with a memory full of ships and seas and peril-
ous headlands and the shining pharos, must
apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties
of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with
several pages of consecutive figures.' The most
comfortable gold-lined office would not tempt
this freedom-loving youth within its doors.

His meagre attention to his engineering studies
came to his father's ears. Mr. Stevenson was
annoyed, too, at his son's rapidly developed
Bohemianism. Louis, suffering from an inquisi-

i66

EDINBURGH DAYS

tiveness which often led him into mischief, had
a fancy for all sorts of strange amusements and
associates. He rebelled against all orthodox en-
tertainments, and could seldom be cajoled into
dress clothes, or persuaded to mix with his equals
in age and social standing. He would not even
dress himself in a seemly style. Nothing but
the oddest, shabbiest garments, peculiar in cut
and colour, would he figure in. His father con-
formed to rules and conventionalities in a peace-
able, law-abiding manner. His aim was to avoid
attracting observation, as he was wishful to go
about his business as unostentatiously as pos-
sible. Louis's tastes were in striking antipathy
to those of his quiet father, for Louis was vain,
although he was not conceited. He weighed and
judged his intellectual powers and faults with a
searching saneness, and his gifts, his achieve-
ments, his honours, never made him vain. It
was a forgivable vanity his. It grew out of a
wish to be appreciated and pleasant. One sees
its like in children. They will seize a tea cosy
and put it on their heads, or don a pair of
spectacles and march into a room, brimful of
expectancy at the laugh they hope will greet
them. Louis's vanity was such that one can
only smile at it, it is so innocently apparent.

167

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Louis loved to give and receive surprises. His
stepdaughter tells how he would pin in noticeable
places, verses he had written as birthday or
home-coming greetings. That was when his
quaint whims were treasured as coming from a
man of genius. In his Edinburgh days he made
no verses, but in their place his puerile affecta-
tion of oddness was his ruse to attract attention.
He and Professor Blackie were somewhat akin
in their childish stratagems to feed their child-
like vanity. They both became enamoured of
their eccentricities, which sprang in both cases
from the same peculiar state of mind . The Greek
professor's well-known plaid in which he paraded
Princes Street, the straw hat and dressing-gown
he wore in his home, were very becoming cos-
tumes, much more pleasing than those of his
truant student with his incongruously assorted
habiliments. These two Scotsmen had a gay
Gallic vein in them which made them overleap
national shyness, and this ingenuous vanity and
the irresponsible playfulness in their sunshiny
natures made them play a rdle all their own.

Louis, in a letter telegraphic in its brevity,
gives a summary of this period of his life : ' I
was educated for a civil engineer on my father's
design, and was at the building of harbours and

i68

EDINBURGH DAYS

lighthouses, and worked in a carpenter's shop
and a brass foundry, and hung about wood-
yards and the Hke. Then it came out I was
learning nothing, and, on being tightly cross-
questioned during a dreadful evening walk, I
owned I cared for nothing but literature. My
father said that was no profession, but I might
be called to the Bar if I chose. At the age of
twenty-one I began to study law.' That was
doubtless a very dreadful evening walk, but
people are apt too often to consider Thomas
Stevenson a dense, short-sighted man for thus
tiying to thwart his boy's wishes. A great deal
has to be said on Mr. Stevenson senior's side.
His wisdom in insisting on Louis becoming^ an
advocate bore good fruit. It gave the plunging,
restive youth, who was then an impetuous, un-
broken colt, like to gallop himself lame with
eagerness, a taste of the disciplining curb. It
gave him a line of steadying, wholesome routine
to follow, and meanwhile he had time to gain
more tolerance and insight into his own as well
as other people's natures. Mr. Stevenson was
bitterly disappointed on that dreadful evening
walk. He had helped to build a great and
honoured business ; he wished his son to con-
tinue in his solid, utilitarian profession. As a

169

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

docile child Louis craved to be an engineer.
When other children fixed on their future careers,
little Lew vowed —

' But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I 'm
to do,
O Leerie, I '11 go round at night and light the lamps
with you.'

He visited the harbours of Fife, when thirteen,
with Mr. Stevenson. ' My first professional tour,
my first journey in the complete character of man
without the help of petticoats,' he proudly calls
this visit to the golden fringe of the grey mantle
of the kingdom of Fife. Louis enjoyed these ex-
cursions with his father hugely. Mr. Stevenson's
heart's desire was to see his son established in
what had become an hereditary vocation in his
family. Then, suddenly, he found he had a
changeling child, who would wrest no vantage
ground from the ocean, nor toil till he built on
some wild shore a protective harbour or a tower
flashing with an abiding warning light. He was
determined to pursue that will-o'-the-wisp, litera-
ture. From Vailima, in one of his last letters,
Louis, recalling that sore fight with his father,
and some of Mr. Stevenson's arguments in favour
of his sure profession, says : * Were it not for
my health, which made it impossible, I could

170

EDINBURGH DAYS

not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I
did not stick to an honest common-place trade
when I was young, which might have supported
me during these ill years. But you men with
salaries don't know how a family weighs on a
fellow's mind.*

Sage old Johnson says, * WTien a man is young
he thinks himself of great importance. As he
advances in Hfe he learns to think himself of no
consequence, and becomes more patient and
better pleased.'

Robert Louis Stevenson was wayward and im-
patient, full of ' the gloom of youth,' in the days
which culminated in that ' dreadful ' walk.
Suave of tongue, kind of heart, as a rule sensi-
tively shrinking from wounding any one, he
flouted and ran counter to his father on many
subjects with the inhuman selfishness of youth.
The reser\'ed elder man was more pained than
the fervid, agitating son. But they were closely
bound together for all their antagonism. They
had many a united talk, though it seemed to
those who knew not their ways, a wordy war ;
but, like wise men before them, they, * except m
opinion,'' were not disagreeing, having, as a
modern writer says, * the same immense ortho-
doxy that lies beneath our differences.'

171

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Mrs. Stevenson was relieved, when her husband
and son returned from that memorable evening
confabulation, to find the storm which had been
pending had broken and cleared the atmosphere.
Mr. Stevenson held that none of Louis's juvenile
efforts at writing, which his mother treasured,
were of sufficient merit to justify his thinking of
earning his bread by his pen. He hoped his
readiness of speech might help him at the Bar.
Sir Walter Scott averred his legal training had
given him stability. He regarded literature as
a crutch, not as a sole staff. Louis Stevenson
liked the idea of following Scott, though he
resolved literature would be his staff. It is
curious that he, like Scott, learned much of sea-
faring among the misty isles of the North. Louis
journeyed in the Pharos, the Northern Lighthouse
steamer. Louis's grandfather and Sir Walter
had viewed the scenes of The Pirate in a voyage
in 1 8 14 in the Pharos of that day. Mrs. Steven-
son approved of the settlement of the vexed
question. Many a literary man besides Scott
had walked the boards of the Parliament House
and been all the better man of letters for his
legal training and standing. She, perhaps alone,
knew how bitter a disappointment it was to her
husband to have his only son refuse to become

EDINBURGH DAYS

heir to the business he had arduously and proudly
enlarged. She, as usual, took a cheerful view of
the future, pictured Louis a learned judge, as the
mention of the pen as a staff irritated the engin-
eer, and while she allayed her husband's heart-
burnings she encouraged the son to begin his
legal studies seriously, so as to earn time eventu-
ally to proceed with his chosen profession, which
his father persisted was no profession at all.

Like Fleeming Jenkin, he held (till in each case
Louis proved to them they were wrong) ' that
literature was not a trade ; that it was no craft ;
that the professed author was merely an amateur
with a door-plate.'

Louis recognized the fact that he had wounded
his father on his tenderest point, that he had
taken these wounds gallantly, and had advised
wisely ; so to make amends he promised to do
more than look into his law classes when he
happened to pass that way.

Before he was twenty-one Louis had weathered
the heaviest equinoctial gale of his spring-time of
Hfe ; and he now looked fonvard hopefully to the
desert of the future, though his mother was the
only one who believed, at that time, that he would
turn that desert into an evergreen garden.

^73

LEARNING TO WRITE

'75

'The morning drum-call on my eager car
Thrills unforgotten yet ; the morning dew
Lies yet undried along my field of noon.'

— Songs of I ravel.

176

CHAPTER VIII

LEARNING TO WRITE

' No one ever had such pains to learn a trade as
I had, but I slogged at it day in day out, and
I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry)
I have done more with smaller gifts than almost
any man of letters in the world,' he wrote in
1887. He began his apprenticeship to the art
he adopted almost in babyhood, trying to put
his thoughts into words when he had not very
long gained the power of speech, and insisting
on Cummy writing his gibberish. The History
of Moses was his first comprehensible piece of
composition ; then that was followed by Records
of Noseingdale and the Sunbeam, and by 1864
he had manuscripts in his Heriot Row den to
consult over and show to his literary school
friend. In these hobbledehoy days he wrote
many ponderous works. In his thirteenth year,
while on a tour to Fife with his father, he was
full of excitement at the prospect of a drive over
Magus Moor and of passing the spot where

M »77

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Archbishop Sharpe was murdered. Among the
partakers in that deed Louis confesses ; ' The
figure that always fixed my attention is that of
Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with
his cloak about his inouth. An incident, at once
romantic and dramatic, which awakes the judg-
ment and makes a picture for the eye. How
Httle do we reaHze its perdurable power ! Had
he not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had
the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he
would not have haunted the imagination of my
boyhood. It is an old temptation with me to
pluck away that cloak and see the face ; to
open that bosom and read the heart. With
incomplete romances about Hackston the drawers
of my youth were lumbered.' In these years of
preparation for a legal career his mind was set
on literature. He determined to succeed in
putting into fitting phrases the thoughts that
welled up so freely. Great was his admiration
of those who had succeeded. He says he played
the ' sedulous ape ' to Hazlitt, Lamb, Words-
worth, Sir Thomas Browne, Defoe, Hawthorne,
and Montaigne. He called these trials at imita-
tions * monkey tricks ' and * ventriloquial efforts.'
' It was so Keats learned,' he says, ' and there
never was a finer temperament in hterature.'
178

EDINBURGH DAYS

Edinburgh being, as he notes, a town with the
traffic congested into a few streets, residents oft-
times encounter their fellow-townsmen. In
Princes Street, Louis constantly observed Dr.
John Brown strolling along, spectacled, benign,
keenly but kindly eyeing the passers-by. The
Doctor, in Louis's eyes, was never alone, for
behind him stalked his immortal dog ' Rab.'
Louis heartily envied the man who had created
that faithful follower, for he had never studied
the trade of writing ; but as Louis, speaking to
him in his verses, notes : —

' Your e'e was gleg, your fingers dink ;
Ye didna fash yoursel' to think,
But wove, as fast as puss can Hnk,

Your denty wab ;
Ye stapped your pen into the ink,
An' there was Rab ! '

But Louis knew well that, as a rule, it took
years of strife to make an author's

* Things o' clay spreid wings o' hfe.'

Another example of one who seemed to enjoy

a heaven-born intuition how to wield a pleasing

pen, had also limped cheerfully along Princes

Street. Of Scott, Louis says, ' Of the pleasures

of his art he tasted fully ; but of its toils and

179

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

vigils and distresses never man knew less. A
great romantic — an idle child.'

Freakish and fitful as Louis was, he realized
from the first it was not chance that would help
him into the foremost ranks. Some he knew
would spend years seeking for the four-leaved
clover, the coveted key to the gates of fortune,
while others would plough and sow till they had
a field of four-leaved clovers. These workers
trusted not to luck, but to labour ; for, as Mark
Twain says, in one of his serious moments,
* There is many a way to win in this world, but
none of them is much worth without good hard
work to back it.*

In a * College Magazine,* Louis describes how
he, the seemingly consistent pattern idler in his
dronish wanderings, was in reality always busy,
for he was armed with two books — one to read
and one to write in. * It was not so much,' he
says, * that I wished to be an author (though I
wished that too), as that I vowed that I would
learn to write. That was a proficiency that
tempted me, and I practised to acquire it, as
men learn to whistle, in a wager with myself.'
He persevered till he said, * he had legions of
words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of
phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice,

1 80

EDINBURGH DAYS

and he himself knowing what he wants to do
and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability)
able to do it.'

In 1873 he made the acquaintance of Sidney
Colvin, who became his adviser and critic in
literature, and who introduced him to some in-
fluential editors. -Louis's first paper was pub-
lished in The Portfolio. The essay was entitled
' Roads,' and was signed L. S. Stoneven. His
second, 'Ordered South,' written the same
winter at Mentone, appeared in Macmillan's
Magazine. This article, founded on fact, for his
health sent him abroad, took him three months
to write, for he was still an apprentice, and even
when a master craftsman he would write and
re-write with laborious patience. * Whole chap-
ters of Otto/ he tells us, * were written as often as
five or six times.' Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin was
living at Bournemouth when Louis was writing
her husband's memoir. * I used,' she says, * to
go to his room in the afternoon after tea, and
tell him all I could remember of certain times
and circumstances. He would Hsten intently,
every now and then checking me while he made
a short note, or asking me to repeat or amplify
what I had said, if it had not been quite clear.
Next morning I went to him again, and he read

x8i

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

aloud to me what he had written — my two hours
of talk compressed into a page, and yet it seemed
to me all there, all expressed. He would make
me note what he had written, word by word,
asking me, " Does this express quite exactly
what you mean ? " Sometimes he offered me
alternative words, " Does this express it more
truly ? " If I objected to any sentence as not
conveying my meaning, he would alter it again
and again, unwearied in taking pains.' Will o
the Mill was th^ first story he ventured to
reprint. The scenery in it was in part a remem-
brance of the Brenner Pass, in the Tyrol, which
he had crossed when twelve. As a boy, he
must have studied his surroundings, and with
his artistic perceptions all awake, decided it
would make a telling scenic effect when he
would stage a romance to suit it. His father
complained that Louis did not use the eyes God
had given him, but was gazing at trivialities,
while the engineer was observing the forceful
action of the Tweed, and considering how best
it could be yoked to work for human good.
While Thomas Stevenson's sight had been trained
to ' pore over the engineer's voluminous handy
book of nature,' his son's brown eyes w^ere
noting vital trifles from a different line of vision,
1S2

EDINBURGH DAYS

and his observ^ations were vivid and lasting.
Like the true artist he was, he was ever busy
taking sketches from nature, which he stowed
away in his memory, and had the happy knack
of finding again when he wished to work them
into his bigger canvas. John Todd's tales of
how he took his flocks across the border, by
these inviting by-ways, the now deserted old
drove loans, of the perils of the journey, Louis
listened to in the Pentlands, and these reminis-
cences enabled him to put the audacious Anne
St. Ives under a reliable escort when he left the
shelter of Swanston.

Wlien Louis Stevenson promised his father to
qualify for the Bar, he knew he could find ample
time conscientiously to pursue his legal studies ;
also devote many hours to his self-elected avoca-
tion — ^learning to write. He did not care for
out-of-door relaxations. His pursuit of pleasure
kept him house-bound, for reading and writing
were his recreations. When cringing with cold,
he gave it as his opinion, * Life does not appear
to me to be an amusement adapted to this
weather.' He found it was less bleak when the
haggard wintry day was done, and the lamps
shone on the rainy streets more warmly than the
weakly sun. Then, in the gloaming, when the

183

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

castle and the hills were limned against the
pale indigo sky, Robert Louis Stevenson took
his walks abroad. If a flaw of sunshine came
amid the prevailing bleakness of winter, he
exulted in its rays, and went forth gay and
lively, ready to frolic or bask in the sunlight.
' To travel hopefully is a better thing than to
arrive,' he said. The seemingly toilsome work
to which he had apprenticed himself, cheered
him light-heartedly on his way. ' To have
many aspirations is to be spiritually rich,' he
said, and believing that to be the case, he was
the richest of millionaires.

Much time as he gave to his literary studies,
he did not neglect his promise to his father.
His legal coach, now a professor in the Edin-
burgh University, speaking of him lately, said
he found him an alert, interested, but, at the
same time, an erratic pupil. While expounding
to Louis some point which he ought to impress
on his memor}% Louis's capricious attention had
been riveted by some minor detail, — maybe it
was the history of the maker of the law, — and,
before he would continue his dry-as-dust study,
he would concentrate his energy on unearthing
some biographical fact, or in clothing some legal
quibble with a bright thread or two from the

184

EDINBURGH DAYS

web of his fancy. His note-book was never out
of his hand. * Wait, I '11 jot that down in my
own words,' he would say, or ' What was that
you said I must not forget ? I had better note
it too.' His coach assured him he had a mastery
of his subject, and Louis smiled dehghtedly.
He then thought it would be as well to have two
strings to his bow.

' I want to succeed at the Bar,' he said
earnestly. * Do you really think I am likely
to?'

' We '11 hear you yet before the First Division,'
his tutor was saying, when the excitable Louis
sprang up, holding out his hands to stop him.

' Oh, don't,' he cried, * don't please even
speak of such a thing ; I 'd rather face death
a thousand times than stand up before these
heavy-wigged, red-robed solemnities. Euch !
The veriest thought of such a thing makes me
shiver to the marrow of my bones ' ; and he
huddled himself into a pitiable, teeth-chattering
object, shaking his hair over his face, and sank
down, as if limp with horror, into a seat. Then
rising, he strode nerv^ously up and down the room,
enlarging, with that voluble speech of his, on
his shyness, w^hich, he said, no one beheved in.
' I hate publicity ; I dread publicity ; I simply

185

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

could not stand up and plead.' This was a true
statement, for his cousin says, * After passing
the examination for the Scottish Bar, he appeared
in the Parliament House with his wig and gown,
and here a tale is told of his first case. He had
merely, at a particular time, to appear before
the Judge, and intimate some preliminary step
in a case ; but when the time came, his heart
seemed to recoil from the necessary- phraseology,
and he had to get a brother la\\ycr to say the
short sentence necessary.* In a private room
Louis was the best of speakers, no matter what
subject was being discussed ; but even at the
* Speculative,' when called on to wag his usually
almost too ready tongue, his delivery^ was poor,
though he had no lack of words ; the circling
action of his hands, which were as part of his
speech, had to be curtailed, for if indulged in
on a platform the exaggerated flourishes moved
the audience to laughter. Ridicule was to Louis
a deadly weapon. He was fitted with no armour
against its poignancy. Before it he stood un-
armed and naked. His harmless, naive vanity
was specially liable to hurts by ridicule. Never
having associated much with other children, he
had not early run the gauntlet of the cruelly
candid speech, the ingenious modes of teasing

1 86

EDINBURGH DAYS

which they indulge in, and to which they become
case-hardened. Louis, with an overbalance of
sensitiveness, was always touchily thin-skinned.
He could not bear pubHcity. A platform noto-
riety he shrank from in terror, though he liked
to create a sensation in a roomful of friends.
Although he had the type of face we often see
in distinguished actors, and for all his poor
physique had a grace of carriage, he would never
have shone on the stage ; for an unsympathetic
audience, a cold reception, not to speak of a
hiss, would have sent him flying to the wings
in ner\'ous despair.

He was fond of private theatricals. It was
the one social amusement he was keen to partici-
pate in. He took particular deHght in those
arranged by Prof. Fleeming Jenkin, but he was
well drilled into his role, and never had a very
prominent part to play. He had attended Pro-
fessor Jenkin's classes during the * vast pleasantr^^
of his curriculum ' at Edinburgh University.
He could not in the professor of engineering's
soul-chiUing classroom solace himself with rest-
less inattention as was his wont, for the professor,
' cocking his head like a terrier, with ever}^ mark
of the most engaging vivacity and readiness,*
fixed an arresting eye on the youth. When he

187

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

came to beg this professor for a certificate of
attendance, he was refused. Louis had played
the truant to excess in his engineering studies.
Professor Blackie, when asked for a Hke certifi-
cate, had looked at this student, noted for the
first time his unique look, and remarked that his
face was not familiar to him. At this uninten-
tional sarcasm Louis smiled, and the Greek
professor, liking sunny looks, smiled back, as he
amiably signed his name. Fleeming Jenkin was
not to be so readily cajoled, and informed his
erring pupil, who had lost many opportunities
for orthodox study, ' You are no fool, and you
chose your course.' But the conscientious pro-
fessor and the truant pupil became firm allies
when Louis had given in his decision at head-
quarters as to his resolution not to be an engin-
eer. This friendship was fraught with much
good for Louis. He v/as still among the ' coiled
perplexities of youth,' and Fleeming Jenkin,
from his years and experience and sympathy,
showed him how to straighten out some of the
tangled skein.

They mutually appreciated an opponent who
would fight a well-parried duel of argument.
They had many tastes, many disHkes, in com-
mon. Both delighted in the heroics, in hearing

EDINBURGH DAYS

of valiant deeds, of ennobling thoughts. Both
found them stimulating. Both disliked golf,
and golf, says Louis, ' is a cardinal virtue in
the City of the Winds.' Nor did either of
them become an archer of the Queen's Body-
guard, * which is the Chiltem Hundreds of the
distasted golfer.' Both were lovers of the stage.
The play that Fleeming Jenkin put on the boards
once a year gave to a certain coterie ' a long and
an exciting holiday in mirthful company.'

Mrs. Stevenson was pleased that her son, who
cared little for respectable company and for none
of Edinburgh's social gatherings, but railed un-
ceasingly at the buckram of a comfortable
citizen's life, had found a West-End house to
his taste, and she was glad of the warm friend-
ship which sprang up between the professor and
her boy. The professor had a good influence
over Robert Louis Stevenson when he was still
supple and immature enough to bend and improve
under a training hand. * I remember,' records
Louis, * taking his advice upon some point of
conduct. " Now," said he, " how do you sup-
pose Christ would have advised you ? " and
when I had answered that He would not have
counselled me anything unkind or cowardly —
** No," he said, with one of his shrewd strokes

189

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

at the weakness of his hearer, " nor anything
amusing." ' This frankly acknowledged weak-
ness led Louis into many flippant perversions ;
his * tricksy mocking ' look bore fruit in words.
Professor Jenkin reminded Louis when he was
in a critical humour, picking holes in other
people's work, that, in Professor Blackie's words,
' All criticism worthy of the name is the ripe fruit
of combined intellectual insight and long experi-
ence. Only an old soldier can tell how battles
ought to be fought. There is no more sure sign
of a shallow mind than the habit of seeing always
the ludicrous side of things.'

Stevenson, in these embr\'o days, before he
had done any recognized work, was harder in
his judgments than when his opinion was of
weight. His essay on Burns is a sample of his
sneeringly severe criticisms. He expressed a
wish when in \'ailima that he could re-WTite his
paper on Robert Young, for, as he says, ' His
profile was blurred in the boyish sketch. I should
like well to draw him again with a maturer touch.'
He would have re-focussed Burns, too, for the
tooth of time gnawed away the hardness of youth,
and made him ' more gently scan his brother
man.* Stevenson sketched Robert Burns in his
untrained days, when he, who never had a sorrow

190

EDINBURGH DAYS

in his life, could not enter into the tragedy of
convivial Burns. Carlyle realized the tragedy,
and drew him as only a finished artist can.
WTien Louis had won his spurs, he looked on
the work of his fellow-knights, of those still in
the ranks, with the most lenient of eyes.

Louis Stevenson, though amenable to advice
and snubbing, if administered judiciously by those
he held not in awe but in respect, had very de-
cided opinions of his own, which he aired and
defended, not only among those of his age, but,
and what was ver}^ prejudicial to him, in the
face of his elders. Hearing him fearlessly attack
some reverend senior's pet foible, unsparing in
his thrusts, many would think young Stevenson
was contentious and uplifted, but when he came
to his own merits he was the most modest and
unbragging of youths. He seldom spoke un-
kindly of any one. If others did so in his
presence, love of battle and justice made him
at once the champion of those attacked. This
desire to war in words whenever chance offered,
to advocate theories, or contradict other folks,
certainly made him unpopular among those who
did not know him well. He remarked : * I was
a ver>' humble-minded youth, though it was a
virtue I never had much credit for.'

191

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

He was a lonely student. He had compara-
tively few acquaintances of his own age when he
left school. Mr. Baildon describes how he was
smuggled into Heriot Row, or met his friend in
the gardens, when they were schoolmates. To
' make believe ' their scribbling tastes and talk
were contraband was like Louis, and he pre-
ferred to smuggle his literary^ friend into his
home, as such a proceeding had an air of mystery
about it which was attractive. However, when
his law studies had begun, he took a less critical
view of cver>'body and ever>'thing, and lithesome-
ness of spirits bubbled up in him. When free
from the fear of routine on an office stool, he
began to find that his contemporaries, grown out
of the uninviting manners of their boyhood,
were polished and accomplished men whose
friendship was worth cultivating. The Specu-
lative Society brought him into intimate acquaint-
ance with its members. He speaks lovingly of
it in some of his early papers, and in the intro-
duction to Kidnapped. Archie Weir was a mem-
ber of this august debating society — an ancient
and conservative body. It had comfortable
rooms within the University, and Louis liked
the olden customs it held to ; its objections,
for instance, to such innovations as gas, and

192

EDINBURGH DAYS

it adhered to its huge candelabrum of wax
lights.

In the early seventies Louis was twice presi-
dent of the * Speculative.' He wrote several
papers for this society : * The Influence of the
Covenanting Persecution on the Scottish Mind '
(1871) ; 'Notes on Paradise Lost' (1872) ; 'Notes
on the Nineteenth Century ' and ' Two Ques-
tions on the Relations between Christ's Teach-
ing and Modern Christianity ' (1873) J * Law
and Free Will — Notes on the Duke of Argyll.'
* Speculative evenings,' he said, * form pretty
salient milestones on our intellectual journey ;
looking back along mine, I see a good deal of
distance got over — whether well or ill I am
not here to judge.' He tells how, after his
introductory evening there, he made a speech
in a state of * nervous exaltation that we have
no language strong enough to describe. My
electricity,* he says, * seemed negative. I had
no common interests with the others, no old
stories to retell, any remark was a hazardous
experiment ; and I ended my night by walking
home alone, in the blackness of despondency.
How I should have laughed any one to scorn
who had stopped me then on the Bridges and
told me that I should spend in that Society
N 193

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

some of the happiest hours of my life, and make
friends from among those very members who
were now so forbiddingly polite ! ' This quota-
tion is from his Valedictory- x^ddress, given in
March 1872. In it he indulged in some specula-
tion as to great writers who might arise from
among those present now, such as * The Spec'
had cradled in former years, for famous men had
been among its members. No one thought that
the frail, boyish composer of that speech would
ever be more than a dilettante in the profession
of letters — an advocate with private means, no
inclination to practise, and a leaning towards
literature. * And who knows, gentlemen, with
what Scotts or Jeffreys we may have been sharing
this meeting-hall, about what great man we shall
have curious anecdotes to tell over dining-tables,
and write to their biographers in a fine, shaky
octogenarian hand ? We shall have many stories,
too, of fellow-members who did not come to the
surface in after hfe, but, it maybe, went straight-
way to the bottom — many "vivas to those who
have failed and to those whose war vessels sank
in the sea." Yes, if we should have here some
budding Scott, or if the new Shakespeare should
here be incubating his fine parts, we shall all,
gentlemen, have a hand in the finished article —
194

EDINBURGH DAYS

some thoughts of ours, or at least some way of
thinking, will have taken hold upon his mind,
some seasonable repartee, some happy word, will
have fallen into the ''good soil " of his genius,
and will afterwards bring forth an hundredfold!
We shall all have had a hand, I repeat, at making
that Shakespeare or that Scott.'

While he figured constantly at the ' Spec.,' and
was a sought-for guest at the members' dinners,
* L. S. Stoneven ' had not written again, but
papers were appearing in the Cornhill and else-
where signed 'R. L. S.' In the Speculative
Society Roll Book he signed himself Robert
Louis Stevenson, and in a note states what his
baptismal name really was. At that time he
wrote to the ' Spec' secretary a letter of four
pages of comic pomposity, giving his reasons for
diverging from his registered one of Lewis Bal-
four, and announcing his intention to make that
of ' Robert Louis ' famous.

How well he succeeded is recorded in the His-
tory of Our Omn Times. Mr. Justin Macarthy
thus sums up his work : ' Stevenson, judged
impartially by his own works, was undoubtedly
one of the greatest English writers during the
latter part of the nineteenth century. He stole
quietly into the world of fame. He endeared

»95

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

himself to the whole of the reading public of
English-speaking countries. His work was al-
ways essentially his own inspiration, and was
carried out by his own mode of treatment. He
created situations rather than characters, but
when he set about drawing a character he drew
with the firm and steady hand of a master.
There was nothing oblique or vague about him.
What he saw he saw, and what he saw he could
describe. If that is not to be an artist, then we,
at least, have no idea what an artist is.*

196

LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING

197

'The powers and the ground of friendship are a mystery, but
looking back I can discern in part we loved the thing he was,
for some shadow of what he was to be'

—Memories and Portraits.

X98

CHAPTER IX

LEGAL AND LITERARY TRAINING

Rapidly, in these years of legal study, he was
obtaining more and more the command of fluent
expression in language, for he says, * As I walked,
my mind was busy fitting what I saw with ap-
propriate words ; when I sat by the roadside I
would either read, or a pencil and a penny version
book would be in my hand, to note down the
features of the scene, or commemorate some halt-
ing stanzas. Thus I lived with words.' The
result of this close communion with words is to
be found in the various papers he contributed to
Cornhill, papers which have since become famous
in collected form as Virginihus Puerisque. They
were, he said, like * milestones on the wayside
of my life.* To those who knew him in these
past days to re-read them is to travel again
the same road in the same good company. It
was early in the seventies that we first knew
Robert Louis Stevenson, for though we had been
nearly opposite neighbours all our lives, watch-

199

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

ing the same Leerie light the lamps, he never
chanced to play in the division of gardens which
we patronized, nor did he live much in Heriot
Row in spring or summer, when the green
grounds became the meeting-place of neighbour-
ing children. His square of gardens had for a
centre-piece a pond, our envy. In the middle
of this circular scrap of water is a very limited
and rocky islet. Wlien we told Louis how we
had coveted that pond he sympathized. He said
he had longed to invade that mimic eyot, and
he had to wait till frost paved a way. He in
turn envied our pleasaunce when we recounted
to him the joys we had had from the making of
* posies.' They were not bouquets of flowers, as
their names might lead one unversed to suppose,
but holes dug in the grass and cunningly covered
over with turf, so that it needed a trained eye
to discover the site of the pit. In these posies,
which were usually made at some hour when the
gardens were empty, were put * peeries,' marbles,
or our favourite tin soldiers. The owners rose
betimes to see if their hidden treasure was still
secure. Once, some good fair>^ put sixpence into
a posie, and much astonished was the recipient.
Louis would have committed all his worldly
wealth to the earth if he had dug one. There

EDINBURGH DAYS

was a secretiveness and a pleasurable anxiety
about posies which our vivacious friend gauged,
though he did not hear of them until he was
out of his teens.

Wlien Louis was a sleepless boy, Cummy used
to pull aside the blind and show him Queen
Street, on a higher terrace opposite, across what
he called ' the great gulf of darkness,' made by
the Heriot Row gardens. Its street lamps shone
reassuringly, and Louis, wondering if there were
any other children denied the gift of sleep, noted
there was one house opposite where a light burned
every night.

He felt a consoling companionship in that
gleam which came from our old home, 52 Queen
Street. My father burned the midnight oil in
his room high up in that once busy house, for
night was the only opportunity he had, in the
toilful twenty-four hours, to read and study.
Ten years before the time when Louis tossed
restless with fever, hearing all night * the wind
intone ' in that house, early one morning, after
much search, my father found the blessed
anaesthetic qualities of chloroform, and was
lulled by this syrup of sleep into controllable
unconsciousness for the first time. In 1870 our

old home at Queen Street was broken up by

201

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

the death of our parents, and we moved to a
smaller house not very far distant. Mutual law
studies and the Speculative brought Louis and
my brother together. * The Republic/ R. L. S.
called our new abode, where the members were
of an independent equality, which seemed to
Louis a preferable arrangement to the shackles
of monarchical ties, for at that period he owns,
' the unrejoicing faces of his elders filled him
with contemptuous surprise.* He would air his
convictions with uncurbed freedom in the re-
public, where there was no one oppressed and
sage with the weight of years to damp his ardour
by telling him he babbled nonsense. As he him-
self said, he heard his voice echo years after 'in
the empty vestibule of youth.' He would fre-
quently drop in to dinner with us, and of an
evening he had the run of the smoking-room.
After ten p.m., when a stern old servant, who
held by monarchical discipline, and kept a watch-
ful guard over the republic, went to rest, the
* open sesame ' to our door was a rattle on the
letter-box. Louis's fancy for the mysterious was
whetted by this admittance by secret sign, and
we liked his special rat-a-tat, for it was the fore-
runner of an hour or two of talk which he de-
scribed as * the harmonious speech of two or
202

EDINBURGH DAYS

more/ by far the most accessible of pleasures,
and the society talk of even the most brilliant
man is of greatly less account than what you will
get from him (as the French say) in a ' little
committee.' His studies, his notions, his hopes,
he described with a nimble tongue which he
accentuated by his flourishing actions, the
' speaking gestures ' of his thin, nervously
formed hands. He often marvelled that these
hands were not taken into consideration when
he was an amateur emigrant, and was mistaken
for everything under the sun except an educated
gentleman. He says, his fellow-passengers, who
classed him as a working-man seeking occupation
and health in a new world, did not observe his
hands, for the only tool they could hold was the
pen. Then he was ' always supposing.' As a
* callant ' at college, one of his fellow-students
says, as they walked out into the muddy-streeted,
cold town, he varied the monotony of the way
down to Princes Street by ' supposings.' ' If
you were walking along the street with him,'
wrote this companion, ' and the most trivial
thing struck his eye, he would start supposing ;
in fact, there was no end to his supposing, and
I suppose that is how he got to the top of the tree

in fiction/

«03

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Others who came into the * little committee '

by our library hearth might be tired, depressed,

and sit still, enjoying a consoling pipe. Louis

never was glum. He might be in the depth of

dejection, but it was such magnified drooping of

body and soul as to be farcical. Then, when

laughter greeted him, the grotesque sombreness

dispersed like a cloud before sunshine, and he

threw off his cut-throat-looking Spanish cloak,

stood erect with a smile hovering about his long

eyes, as well as on his tricksy mouth. Quiet he

never remained. He could not resist putting in

a word. Still, for all his love of talking, he was

also a good listener, never showing boredom, and

anxious to grasp the meaning of other speakers,

assisting with tactful and sympathetic interest

from out of his own overflowing vocabulary'. He

was always ready to add to his list of words, or

glean insight from his friends' notions. If others

were silent, he had a perfect cataract of thoughts,

of supposings, to pour out, and he seized the

opportunity to clothe them in words befitting his

fastidious taste. Full of perpetual motion, and

for ever walking up and down as he spoke, or

adding action to his words, never sitting placidly

still, his constant unrest was not distracting or

annoying. He flitted about with a womanly
204

EDINBURGH DAYS

cunning, never stumbled over a stool, upbraided
an unoffending sofa for being in the road, or
committed the heinous crime of treading on the
dogs. He might pace up and down, jump up as
if electrified to expound some fresh frolicsome
fancy, but our mastiff and other dogs remained
unconcerned, for they had learned that he would
gingerly pick his steps among their paws, and
there was no necessity to move from the warmest
vantage ground on the rug, or prepare to lay
hold of a disturbing element in the shape of
a leg, a defence against aggressive feet which
was permitted to our veteran terrier by reason
of his toothlessness.

Louis's outlandishness of dress, his manner-
isms, his frenchified flourishing of his hands, and
his transparent modes of attracting attention,
used to come in for derisive condemnation. We
observ-ed that he employed particular Steven-
sonian stratagems in order never to remain long
in the background. If the ceaseless ability he
displayed in wagging that easily set-agoing
tongue of his did not make any impression on
his hearers, if his prominent position in front
of fire with his cigarette, more waved in semi-
circles as he chattered than legitimately smoked,

drew on him no special notice or remark, or

205

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

purposely to bait him, his most pronounced
eccentricities passed unheeded, he cast his fertile
mind about to devise means to bring himself
to the fore. One rare occasion, when he had on
a dress coat, and came in to us on his way
home, he gravely asked leave to take off his
swallow-tail and sit in his shirt-sleeves. This
was really more a ruse to bring himself before
the ' little committee ' than to ease himself of
the garment which he vowed oppressed him,
for when leave was granted, no astonishment
expressed, and his coat folded with laudable
carefulness and relegated to a back seat, a
shadow of such evident chagrin flitted over his
face that it was all that the plotters could do
to refrain from laughing, and so encourage their
victim. For all these whimsical mannerisms
he had to endure a deal of taunting. He pro-
tested against the injustice of our accusations,
but he never took offence at them, though he
defended himself in a manner which should
have done him honour if he had pled as well
before his dreaded Lords of Session. It did not
become a youth of his years, we held, to dress
in such a mountebankish style.

Professor Blackie, for instance, because of his

silver locks and his recognized and honoured
206

EDINBURGH DAYS

position, could, without mockery, wear a plaid
over a frock-coat, and march along Princes
Street beating time with his famed kail runt
staff to the Songs of the North he crooned as he
went. Strangers turned and gazed at the pictur-
esque professor, and that was perhaps what he
wanted. But we explained to Stevenson that
it was forward audaciousness on his part to affect
lank locks, slouch hat, and garments so incon-
gruous and shabby as to be remarkable. * He
always wore his hair long, and frequently looked
anything but groomed, but one mental picture
is indehbly printed in my mind : a flannel shirt,
not over clean, a black and white straw hat
that was well ventilated and had seen much
service, no waistcoat, but round his middle a
red and black scarf with two ends hanging down
behind and showing just below the skirt of his
jacket, the scarf functioning both as a " cummer-
band " and also in lieu of suspenders,' a con-
temporary and friend wrote of him at Hyeres.
His clothes in his Edinburgh days were not much,
if any, better. His flannel shirts attracted the
smuts of wintry weather. In vain his com-
panions showed how starched linen withstood
the assaults of grime. In Edinburgh he could
not rid himself of a waistcoat, but an overcoat,

207

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

such as his friends sheltered themselves beneath
in winter, was, we said, what he ought to wear.
The cloak he preferred, to the handier garment
suggested, was not suited for him of all people,
delicate chested as he was. Such a cloak, too,
in a wind-swept city like Auld Reekie was
dangerously draughty.

Nothing annoyed him more than our state-
ment that his curious taste in dress, which made
him appear a starveling play actor, was an eccen-
tricity he cultivated to draw attention to his
genius. Wlien his uncut hair hung below his
newly donned advocate's wig, he heard a hearty
laugh as he, for the first time, ' added to the
interminable patter of legal feet ' in the Parlia-
ment House. It excited his curiosity. He asked
the reason. It was explained to him that an
inquiring legal senior had asked, as Robert Louis
Stevenson passed, who was * the marvellous boy,
the new Chatterton ' ? That name, received
from the ready legal jester, was nearly the
means of persuading him to go and have his
hair fashionably shorn.

Teasing jibes, which he received in a bountiful
supply, were, he was told, for his ultimate good.
If he had been brought up with a band of
brothers, these small conceits would have been

2o8

EDINBURGH DAYS

nipped in the bud in the nursery. He was told
he should be grateful for home truths, but after
a severe shower of chaff he would sadly throw
away his cigarette, wind himself in his cloak,
and go off with an elaborate bow and with a
tragic droop of his sombrely shrouded form. To
his credit be it said, he bore no ill-will. Next
evening he would return exultant over some new
suggestion he had to make.

It was always a source of wonderment, and
no inquisitorial cross-questioning could extract
the information, why Louis's clothes were never
seen with the gloss of newness on them. They
were always worn where his angular joints were
traceable through the cloth. He scorned to reply
when asked at what pawnshop he acquired them
in this second-hand condition. His excessive
attenuation gave the idea that he had a scarcity
of under-garments on below his rubbed velveteen
and the poverty-stricken trousers. He looked
like a skeleton draped in a sheet. One winter
he wore flannel shirts and turned-down collars
to match, so funereal in colour that he was usually
credited with committing the crime of walking
in Princes Street with black shirts. He vowed
they were blue, but the blue was of a coal-like
shade. When he first appeared in our library
o 209

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

wearing one of them, he was flattered with the
commotion it created. It certainly added to his
vagabondish appearance. He expounded its
merits for a crusoeing expedition. For instance,
it would never look soiled, he said, forgetful that
it never looked clean. The suggestion that he
should visibly number, or have various different
designs embroidered on them, so as to let anxious
friends know when he assumed a fresh one,
damped his delight in them. A skull and cross-
bones was thought of as a fitting emblem for one
piratical shirt. He had been radiant over this
new freak in his wardrobe, but he was so railed
at that he left in high dudgeon, buttoning his
docked velveteen jacket over the offending gar-
ment. Twice he was seen in conventional, brand-
new suits. He looked well in them, for the tailors
artfully banished for once his poorly fed, poorly
clad appearance. He always had a starving-of-
cold look, for with his contracted chest and
huddled-up shoulders he seemed to gather him-
self together for warmth. Mrs. Stevenson ap-
proved of her son's Samoan photographs. He
turned over a new leaf in smartness as to dress
in Vailima, for he writes : * I am now very
dandy ; I announced two \'ears ago that I should
change. Slovenly youth all right — not slovenly

2IO

EDINBURGH DAYS

age. So really now I 'm pretty spruce ; always
a white shirt, white necktie, fresh shave, silk
socks ; oh ! a great sight.' In his loose flannels,
and standing erect before the camera, he looked
more vigorous and broader than his wont. Mr.
Payn, in the introduction to Miss Eraser's In
Stevenson's Samoa, speaking of a group at
Vailima, says, * In the frontispiece I recognise
at once the commanding figure of my old friend
standing by his horse.' In my recollection Louis
was never commanding. To use a Scotch word,
for which there is no English equivalent, he
had a ' shilpit ' look, which is starveling, crined,
ill-thriven, all in one and more.

Both his father and mother had a fine, com-
manding presence : Mr. Stevenson square and
massive, Mrs. Stevenson upright and elegant ;
but Louis had a timid, almost apologetic air.
So much so that when he used to come in with
his head bent forward, glancing alertly from
side to side, and treading with a stealthy care-
fulness, one of our family dubbed him the
'guinea fowl.' On other occasions he would
enter, flinging the door wide open, stepping
springingly, his hands uplifted, as if he were the
forerunner of some triumphant procession. Not-
withstanding his spidery figure, his badly knitted,

SIX

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

weedy frame, he moved with a quiet quickness,
and stood with such a lithe ease of pose that he
struck one as graceful.

He suffered for his grotesque taste in dress
when abroad. He was for ever being arrested.
* For the life of me I cannot understand it,'
he exclaims, after enumerating some woes, how
travelling without a passport he was ' cast, with-
out any figure about the matter, into noisome
dungeons ' ; how, even with a passport, no offi-
cial would believe him to be a Briton. Mistaken
for a pedlar, he was refused admittance at inns.
As a spy he was stopped at frontiers, and there
is no absurd and disreputable means of livelihood
but has been attributed to him in some heat of
official or popular distrust.

When going Across the Plains, two men on
the cars had a bet as to whether he was an out-
of-work musician or no ; and one, to put his sug-
gestion to the test, offered him a place in the
orchestra of a local theatre. This manager lost
five dollars by his wrong guess, and Louis says,
* liquated the debt at the bar.' He owns in the
Epilogue of the Inland Voyage, when the travel-
lers set out on a fresh tour on foot, that he was
unwisely dressed. He had an Indian embroidered
smoking-cap on his head, its golden lace and

212

EDINBURGH DAYS

tassels frayed and tarnished. He wore a piratical
shirt, already spoken of, which he says was * of
an agreeable dark hue which the satirical called
black, a light tweed coat made by a good English
tailor, and a pair of ready-made linen trousers
and leathern gaiters/

This was about 1876, and spies and the war
were fresh in the official mind. The poor con-
tents of the prisoner's pockets, his excitable
manner, his fluency in French, more than ever
assured the gendarme that he was right to arrest
the strange wayfarer. His companion's more
steady pace not suiting Louis's longer strides,
they each walked alone. Cigarette came along
with a sturdy step, bearing the certificate of
his nationaHty in his face and address. The
officials recognized him at a glance as a British
subject. The Commissionary, who had ordered
the arrest of the suspected spy's companion,
was flabbergasted at the new prisoner's appear-
ance : his purse well filled, his passport cor-
rect, and dapperly dressed from head to heel,
en suite, in grey clothes of an unmistakable
Anglo-Saxon cut. They had to forgo further
travels and return to Paris forthwith, for the
officials decided it was well to rid themselves of
the mystery and sent them to headquarters.

213

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Even this, and several other adventures of the
same species, failed to persuade Louis that his
taste in clothes was striking. Many think he
was careless in regard to dress. That was not
so. He gave much thought and time towards
the getting together of his ill-assorted wardrobe.
His friend at Hyeres, already quoted, says, * If
he was careless in dressing himself, he was keenly
appreciative of excellence in others.' Samoa, for
the liberty and range in fantastic dressing its
customs allowed him, must for that reason
alone have suited him. To have, in lieu of
swallow-tail coats, wreaths of flowers to wear on
ceremonious occasions, was to him, indeed, an
* engaging barbarism.* He stuck to the last to
his ideas of ease and taste in dress, for he died
in his sailor's jumper.

The two occasions on which he wore new,
well-made suits dwelt in the memory of his
contemporaries. He had promised to officiate as
groomsman at a friend's marriage. He allowed
himself to be led to the tailor's and have his
clothes ordered for him. Their rigidity terrified
him. He begged for a velvet collar and cuffs to
a frock coat, a gayer waistcoat ; but his tailor,
backed by his two boon companions who had
escorted him to prevent escape, remonstrated :

214

EDINBURGH DAYS

* On this occasion, Mr. Stevenson, you must allow
me to use my judgment ; you can order what
vagaries you choose when you have only yourself
to please.* This rebuke from the man of scissors
quelled him. He dressed for this feast at our
house, as his people were at Swanston, and the
bridegroom feared, unless under surv^eillance to
the last, he might appear in his usual docked
velveteen jacket. But he was childishly inter-
ested in these novel clothes. He felt so strange
in orthodox attire that we had difficulty in
persuading him we were not chaffing when w^e
did not laugh, when he, holding himself erect,
strutted in. Just as we thought he was safely
started for his post of duty, he rushed back and
stood on a chair to see himself once more in a
sideboard mirror, and, with a smile of incredulity,
he saUied forth, apprehensive of hearing jeers
from an astonished populace. He came in one
Sunday evening, saying he had gone to church
with his parents in these wedding garments. He
was honestly chagrined that they had com-
mended his appearance, and he kept marvelhng
that what to him was a singular garb had drawn
no wondering notice down on his tall-hatted head.
The other suit of feasible clothes he was cajoled
into ordering cost him a mauvais quart dlieure.

215

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

They were singularly light-coloured tweeds, and
he wore them one day that he joined us in
London. He made frequent calls on us to ad-
mire him, and we flattered and praised their
make, for in them and that wedding garment
(which he was never seen to wear again since
his churchgoing in them was not considered a
joke) he looked sHght and graceful. The padding
hid his high shoulders, and good cutting hid his
spareness. Walking up the pathway by Holland
House, some smuts fell, and Stevenson scudded
like a ghost in his light robes along the alley
till, breathless, he stopped, and gaspingly asked,
' Have any blacks fallen on my angel clothes ? '
The question suggested a means to chastise him
for overweening pride. We pretended to remove
the offending body from the angelic coat — abused
the clumsiness of an assisting brother for smudg-
ing the biggest smut on the victim's shoulder.
Louis walked on, sadly ill at ease. We were
possessed by demons of mischief : we rubbed in
that imaginary smudge by condoling and suggest-
ing remedies, while Louis tried to see the extent
of the blemish in plate-glass windows. We were
cruel. His pained, nearly weeping, expression
only urged us on to further flights of fancy, till
he tore off his angel coat in High Street, Ken-

2X6

EDINBURGH DAYS

sington. Seeing it still whitely immaculate, the
weight of anxiety passed off his face. Then he
cast a reproachful glance at us, and, with a
forgiving smile, said, * Eh — ^>^ou two brutes — to
misquote a well-known author.' After deliber-
ating whether the spring sunshine were warm
enough to allow him to continue the walk in his
shirt-sleeves, he very leisurely resumed his coat,
and the crowd which was gathering dispersed.
That ' angel ' jacket (so called from its extreme
lightness in colour) was the one he was arrested
in the same autumn at Ch^tillon-sur-Loire, but
by that season it had lost its delicate freshness
and was grimy with travel-stains ; so, worn
along with the shirt of an ' agreeable dark hue,*
turned rusty io the tub, the coat could no longer
be classed as a heavenly garment.

Louis kicked somewhat too vehemently against
the pricks when he was in the heart of the
twenties. He had a hankering for the sunshine
and the South, and to be free of the inanities of
custom ; but, after all, he acknowledges the * old
land is still the true love,' and roving fancies
are but * pleasant infidelities.' The impetuous,
wayward youth had really his lines allotted to
him in very comfortable places. His home was
certainly in a climate he disliked, but he had

ai7

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

to own his native town was fair to look upon.
He could, within ten minutes' walk of the west
end of Princes Street, hear the peewits crying
along the furrows, in fields bordering the Queens-
ferry Road, and even ' in the thickest of our
streets, the country hill-tops find out a young
man's eyes, and set his heart beating for travel
and pure air.' He had means to idle, and leisure
in spring and autumn vacations to travel where
he willed. During April, August, and September
neither law court sits, and college gates are
closed, so he was free to roam. So, though many
think he was uncongenially situated in his home,
the uncongenialness was more the perverse fret-
ting of youth against the necessary harness of
discipline than the actual reality.

He encouraged himself to eschew such amuse-
ments as came in his legitimate way. Balls he
refused to attend, because he had to abandon his
usual clothes and go in regulation dress suit,
which, he boasted, stank in his nostrils. Not
even fancy balls, which would have given him
full scope for fantastic dressing, tempted him.
He took the greatest interest in his companions*
costumes, for he was quick to notice appropriate
clothing on others. Before one fancy ball, an
Edinburgh daily paper supplied ticket-givers

2l8

EDINBURGH DAYS

with schedules for their guests to fill in with
descriptions of their characters. Louis spent a
happy afternoon with us * supposing ' many
staid, religious citizens were going as ver>' re-
markable characters. With dress to suit their
parts the tempting schedules were supplied.
One man of aldermanic proportions we dressed
as * Chieftain of the Puddin' Race ' in haggis
tartan. It was a wet afternoon, and we all
assisted to robe many unsuspected ball-goers.
No one enjoyed acting as Master of the Robes
more heartily than Robert Louis Stevenson. The
President of our Republic, feeHng a sudden
weight of responsibility, sadly owned later that
he had thought it wiser to call on the Editor
and remove these carefully concocted descrip-
tions, for the uninvited guests might not see the
jest in a proper light. They were all in type
when they were brought back and ruefully com-
mitted to the flames.

Acrostics that winter, appearing in the World,
engrossed our time. There was an E — U to be
guessed. One who had been busy at the fancy
ball schedules promptly said, * I know. Elihu
the son of Tisphat.' Louis was charmed at this
ready invention, and walked up and down con-
gratulating the coiner of names. * After my

3x9

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Maker, Elihu the son of Tisphat has always com-
manded my reverence,' he declared. The in-
ventor of Elihu was one of three sisters all noted
for talking. We often w^ondered ' If Louis and

the G 's met, who would speak most ? '

They did meet, and the three ladies, as usual,
all spoke volubly and at once, and the room
was a babble of laughter and voices. Louis's
was dumb, for he could not be heard. When
they left the dining-room, up he sprang, radiant
with a new ' supposing.' * Suppose I was a
Turk,' he said, 'and married to all three Miss

G 's at once, would I turn deaf or dumb ? '

His attendance at conventional entertainments
was as rare as his suit of properly cut clothes,
occasions to be remembered. For the ordinary
dinner-party he had no stomach — Babylonish
feasts he called them. Sometimes when he came
into his ' little committee * other members of it
might have returned from what he characterized
as Noah's Ark dinner-parties. He always in-
quired what other beasts they had gone in to
feed with, two and two, and what talking enter-
tainment the animal they had been paired with
had treated them to. The flowers and dresses
sported on such occasions also interested him.

' The table was all blobs of purple and yellow
220

EDINBURGH DAYS

things,' said one, lighting his pipe and glad to
be in his smoking-jacket again. * You mean
violets and primroses ? ' suggested another.
* Spring,' said Louis, jumping up. He spoke
for long of the joys of the opening year, for the
mention of the woodland firstlings was as a
breath of the country to him. If our friend did
not hke stiff banquets, he did not debar himself
from unconventional ones. On my birthday in
December, having with some friends been bitten
with a mania for the culinar\^ art, we decided
to cook the natal feast ourselves to show our
lately acquired prowess. Robert Louis Steven-
son promptly accepted his invitation to this
dinner, and helped at making a code of rules.
We decided, if we cooked, the men must wait.
Whether those who were to be butlers were to
appear in evening clothes or not was long dis-
cussed, and finally decided in the affirmative.
We cooks were to dine in our aprons. (W'e took
the precaution to have a fresh supply for dining-
room use.) The cook and housemaid had a
holiday, and some ten of us took possession of a
clean kitchen. Our old servant Jarvis retired
to the seclusion of his pantry. He had been
lenient, but somewhat contemptuous of this
' ploy,' and as curious as ourselves as to the

22X

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

result of our endeavours. He would only vouch-
safe a well-known adage in regard to the number
of cooks and the broth. Unless some untoward
accident befell it, my mind was at rest about the
said broth, for its nature had necessitated the
previous preparation of its stock. My comrades
were coached as to its ingredients ; so, if any
guest cast doubts on it being of our own making,
we would glibly dumbfound them with our
knowledge of what was ' intil't.' We decorated
the dinner table so as to prevent, in case of
accidents, absolute starvation. We had loaves
on the sideboard, and a couple of round Dutch
cheeses on the table among the dessert. The
cheeses, with their ruddiness, lent themselves
to decoration, and a 'prentice hand at sculpture
fashioned them into a semblance of a bucolic
face. We covered their bald scalps with brist-
ling celery, and softened the prominent hardness
of their brows by fringes of cress. The cook
returned in time to dish our dinner, and Jarvis
meanly ushered her in, to see her start of horror
when she beheld a rockery of pans piled below
the table, and a slide of grease over her white
floor. He grimly enjoyed her surprise * I did
not, for I knew I had to face her next morning,
without the protection of guests. When she came

222

EDINBURGH DAYS

in we were all busily engaged in picking up the
potatoes ; the pot they were in, being too heavy
for novices' arms, had upset, and half its contents
were flying over the slippery floor, half were
seeking death by drowning in a much-choked
sink. We captured the runaways and applied
resuscitating measures to the drowned. The
dinner was a success ; the food varied, but the
spirits and the good-will of the guests kept high
and steady. No one entered more fully into
the fun of the feast than Louis Stevenson. As
it was a species of fancy dress affair, he came
in ' waiter's ' clothes, but softened their stiffness
by a newspaper cap and a white apron. He
received the dishes at the door, and introduced
the viands with a preface, at which he was as
ready with his tongue as with his pen. We
cooks promptly complained of the waiting,
which was wrong-sided and spasmodic. Louis
conveyed an entree in a grand march round the
room with much high-stepping ; but he was so
engaged in talking that he was as awkward as
his clumsy brother waiters at serving it.

Sometimes, when he took pot luck with us,
and seasoned our dinner with good company, he
would be so busy holding forth on some new
theory that a dish would wait at his elbow for

223

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

a length of time Jarvis thought inadvisable.
The old man would give it what he called a
shuggle to attract attention, and that failing,
break out with ' Hoot, sir, gang on wi' your dinner
or let ithers gang.' Louis tried this ' shuggle.'
Jarv'is had always the cloth in his mind, but the
new waiter had not. A point of the feast was
reached when a new supply of forks was needed.
To Jar\as, to * scart his siller ' was a crime of
deepest dye. Our faithful tyrant's forbearance
broke down when he caught sight of ' yon laddie
Stevenson ' dealing forks (mixed with knives)
like cards : ' Lll wait on the twenty o' ye, but
gi'e me my siller ; I canna hae it dadded,' he
cried. Stevenson, who flattered himself he was
assuming the rdle of waiter to perfection, whisk-
ing about with a napkin under his arm, was
loth to retire. He begged to be allowed to
serv^e an apprenticeship as footman under
Jarvis; but he would have 'no such daft-like'
assistant. He commanded Louis, who was one
of his favourites, to resume his seat and behave

* weise-like.' Then he meanly said that if Mr.
Stevenson had not been mixing the knives and
silver together, he would have noticed that none
of the ladies had taken potatoes, and added :

* I ken why.' Louis abandoned his warfare —
224

EDINBURGH DAYS

his hopes of a butlership, and fell into his seat.
He said he wished to know the worst at once,
and begged Jarvis, as a staunch friend and the
only grey-headed one among us, to tell him the
truth, and the story of the * couping * of the
potatoes was revealed. Louis sat sad and silent
for a brief space, and vowed he would turn
cannibal and eat a human-headed cheese, but
recovered when the happy thought occurred to
him to make the cooks taste first, and he sup-
posed himself to be an Emperor who only by
caution could avoid a poisoned dish. The
crackers, which were among a somewhat unusual
dessert, were as great a joy to Louis as they
would have been if he had gone back a decade
or two in his life. The varied caps in which the
company dressed themselves pleasured him as
much as if he were again a flushed and fluttered
child in blouse and socks. Crowns were too
large, mitres nearer his size, but he hankered
after the jester's cap. A pair of match-holders,
with frogs climbing up their sides, have lived
twenty years and more on my mantelpiece.
Louis brought them up to the drawing-room
that evening, bearing one aloft in each hand,
to lay them literally at my feet with an Eastern
obeisance. We finished our party off with a
p 225

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

dance. Louis seldom danced in an Edinburgh
drawing-room after he got into swallow-tails,
but the motley assemblage of cooks and waiters
in many-coloured head-gear suited his particular
taste, and he footed it merrily at that irregular
gathering, which left behind it laughter-moving
memories for many long years.

226

LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE

a?7

'To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen
to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept
your soul alive.'

— The Inland Voyage.

228

CHAPTER X

LIFE AT TWENTY-FIVE

Though we chaffed him sorely on his * eccen-
tricities of genius,' we never found fault with
his enthusiasm, an enthusiasm so infectious and
refreshing. He was always brimful of new
impressions, a rabid Radical keen on sweeping
changes, or anxious to untie another knot he had
found in his labyrinth of religious confusions.
He changed in a trice from grave to gay with a
dexterous swiftness which was free of restless-
ness or flightiness. He never let himself or his
Hsteners be bored or tired by concentrating atten-
tion too long on one subject. As a talker by
the winter fireside in these days, we gave him
the crown for being the king of speakers. Before
he had learned the art of writing he had acquired
the power of speech, and a way of expressing him-
self which charmed his hearers. He believed that
his tongue had been given him to say pleasant
things to his fellow-beings. His * spice of wit '

was Irish in its promptness and pleasantness.

229

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

He had none of the exaggeration of American
humour, and he winced under the slow felHng,
humiliating style that Scotch humour excels in.
' I love fighting,' he said, * but bitterly disHke
people to be angr>^ with me — the uncomfortable
effect of fighting. I am made up of contradic-
tory elements, and have a clearing-house inside
of me where I dishonour cheques of bitterness.*
When he fought with that weapon, his tongue, he
fought a fair fight from pure love of battle, never
harbouring ill-will, though feeling wounds more
acutely than most from his super-sensitiveness.
His politeness to people he was not in accord
with brought him up before the Bar of the
' Little Committee ' on the charge of being a
humbug. He never acquired the brusque, honest
rudeness of the true-born Scot, either in manner
or appearance. Dull people were the only human
beings he belaboured with scorn. Considering
that then he was in the full bloom of the critical
self-satisfaction of youth, this showed his just
mind and kindliness of heart. Bad-tempered or
vicious people he could respect ; but folk with
torpid minds he fell foul of, and after loadmg
them with comical sarcasms, reproach, and com-
miseration, he would next begin to wonder how
it would feel to be inside their dense minds.
230

EDINBURGH DAYS

He was, with that inquisitiveness of his, always
longing to wear other people's shoes, to see
where they pinched — king's shoes or beggar's

* bauchles ' he would have tried — and his imagin-
ings of comforts to be derived from, or pains
suffered in, the wearing of them, he would give
us as he stood on the hearth smoking endless
cigarettes.

He was tireless in his search for new sensa-
tions and new experiences. No one ever had
such an insatiable curiosity. He did not take
Thoreau's advice : * Do not seek so anxiously to
be developed, to subject yourself to many in-
fluences, to be played on ; it is all dissipation.'
He revelled in being so played upon — a new tune
every day he would have liked. Rathillet's cloak
about his mouth excited his boyish interest in
that first visit of his to Fife, where he found that

* history broods over that part of the kingdom
like the easterly haar.' The Princes Street Gar-
dens attracted him, not only for seclusion, but
because there he always hoped to find on the
green slope a subterranean passage which in
olden days had led from the houses on the
Castle Hill to the Nor' Loch.

In his very early days Louis told us he had

longed for a brother, so that he might call him

231

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Raca, and see what would happen. We assured
him if he had come over to our nursery he would
have experienced prompt punishment from the
powers on high ; for, on the use of any unparlia-
mentary language, our nurse, a disciplinarian,
would have applied a spoonful of mustard to the
erring tongue. Louis asserted that though this
treatment had given us a horror of * Colman,'
it did not seem to have eradicated opprobrious
epithets from our vocabular>\ In fact, he con-
sulted Jarv^is as to our upbringing, for he was
puzzled to find that we younger members of a
long family had eluded the Shorter Catechism,
and only knew a few psalms and paraphrases in
metre. He persisted that he once heard us
wrangling as to whether there were eleven or
twelve commandments. We pretended to be
offended by this statement, and he was profuse
in his apologies, but he refused to be convinced,
and baptized us the Scottish Heathen.

He told us he had been taught from his infancy,
along with the Shorter Catechism, that the devil,
for obvious reasons, always favoured the first
ventures of a gambler. He, with a firm belief
in this, and anxious to cheat Satan, when ordered
South, put five pounds on the gaming-table, hug-
ging himself with the knowledge that this was
232

EDINBURGH DAYS

to be his last as well as his first venture. He
was full of visions how he would spend the gold
thus won from the devil, so he put his money
down with smiling confidence — and lost. He was
utterly flabbergasted. He felt, he said, as if a
prop of his belief had been shattered, but he
added that Satan made a mistake if he thought
he would ever get him to try his luck again.

When his ventures and theories failed, naturally
he was crestfallen, but with his determination to
be cheerful, and his elastic nature, he brightened
up, and sought for some other ground to explore.
His conversation wandered through many curious
by-paths, and was overflowing with strangely
odd conjectures. At one time he was bent on
founding a pawning society. Every one was to
pawn under the title of Arthur Libble the world
over. Some future investigator of musty records
was to be astounded that Arthur Libble had been
constantly raising money on all manner of things
in every quarter of the globe. Lives of Arthur
Libble were to be written in coming centuries,
and many conjectures made as to the manner of
man he was. Louis reHshed, as he said, * to
play with possibility, and knock a peg for fancy
to hang on,* and he saw and planned many pos-
sibilities as to Arthur Libble. We said we did

233

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

not want to pawn anything ; and Louis, who had
come in elated, was very depressed because we
would not join in this new-fangled fad of his.

Another evening he fell to conjecturing, if he
were suddenly transplanted back to the four-
teenth or fifteenth centur}', what vocation in
life would have suited him. His companions
said they would have gone, heavily sheathed in
armour, as knights or their followers, career-
ing about on cart horses. Though Louis, too,
would fain have been one of them, he knew his
want of physical strength would have debarred
him from that rough-and-ready life. He thought
a jester would have suited his capabilities —
Wamba, Touchstone, Yorick, and many friends
in motley sprang up to bear him company.
His face shone, and he perambulated up and
down the librar>^ picturing himself ' a fool i' the
forest.' A man-at-arms shattered his dreams,
and brought him to a standstill on the rug. He
held Louis had not brains enough for a jester,
but our gay R. L. S. defended his aptitude for
the post gallantly. Finally, however, he had
to abandon this bright-robed career. The man-
at-arms showed our slim friend that although he
could certainly talk so as to amuse two or three
gathered round a nineteenth-century library fire,
234

EDINBURGH DAYS

he had no voice to sing to the ladies in the bower,
no diplomatic tact wherewith to humour his
lord, and would have given w^ay to the temptation
to harangue guests gathered round the baronial
board on some private hobby of his own. He
most unwillingly reUnquished cap and bells,
and tried, without success, many employments.
* I believe I would have to have been a turnspit,'
he cried in despair, but another vowed he was
unfit even for that, for he would have scattered
gra\y as he scattered cigar ash, as he could no
more keep his hands from their dumb pantomime
than his tongue from its flow of words. Finally,
and humbly, he took refuge in the Church, but
as he could not even angle for Friday's dinner,
he fixed that his Middle Ages vocation would
have been clerk to the buttery and cellar.

After long marvelling at my brother's fondness
for birds, and the pleasure he obtained from his
small aviary which adjoined the librar>% Louis
thought he, too, would like to taste of the joys of
bird-keeping. He dashed in one forenoon to say
he had started a cageful of avadavats. For a
few days he came regularly to sing their praises.
Then he arrived with them, and begged that they
might be taken from him, for they had got on
his nerves. His bulletins of satisfaction at their

235

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

presence were all sanguine make-believes. The
scraping of their bills, their perpetual feeble chirp,
irritated him, and the sight of the line of them
crushed up together for warmth, made him, too,
feel chilly.

Louis wanted to see if he could satisfy the
appetite for sugar of a greedy pug we had. The
dog had still a capacity for more lumps when the
bag of sugar was empty, so Louis said he thought
he could not afford to investigate that matter
further. Some views on dessert plates instigated
him to read Dumas to find out what they por-
trayed. He was one of those curious passengers
Thoreau speaks of, who looked over the tafferel of
his craft during the voyage over the sea of life,
and did not journey like a stupid sailor picking
oakum. He saw many wonders that other
passengers were blind to. In great, as well as
in trivial things, Louis Stevenson was full of
absorbing curiosity. He could understand
Shelley when, with Jane WilHams, in a cockleshell
of a boat, he suggested, ' Now, let us together
solve the great myster}^*

Louis did not hesitate to get into all sorts and
conditions of mischief to * see what it was like.*
No experience, good or bad, did he hear of, but
he must try to see it from his point of view.

236

EDINBURGH DAYS

Sidney Colvin, writing of Robert Louis Stevenson,
says : ' A restless and inquiring conscience kept
him inwardly calling in question the grounds of
conduct and the accepted codes of societ>% and
he himself says he was of a conversable temper
and insatiably curious in the aspects of life, and
spent much of his time scraping acquaintance
with all classes of men and womenkind.'

His father, in his college days, gave him two
shillings and sixpence a week for pocket-money.
* A man can't help being sober and moral on
that,' he said ruefully to a friend, holding out
the dole. This friend, meeting him years after
by Australasian seas, reminded him of the scene,
and Louis laughed merrily. He said he had for-
gotten it, but the mention of the very street-
corner where they had talked, when he thirsted
for foresights of hfe, brought it all back to him.
Mr. Stevenson was far from being miserly, so no
doubt he had excellent reason for his limited
allowance to his son. Louis had his comfortable
home. Unlike most fathers, Mr. Stevenson
urged his son in vain to run up a tailor's bill
for suitable clothes. Louis also could get on
credit anything within reason at the shops his
parents patronized ; but he had proved he
could be reckless of money out of curiosity, ' just

237

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

to feel what it was like to be a spendthrift/ as
readily as he would waste his emotions without
sense of proportion. Two friends of his, to curb
their extravagance in dress and superfluous
knick-knacks, never bought anything without
notifying the fact to one another. Louis enjoyed
the letters which passed between them, demand-
ing liberty to make a purchase. He said he could
not join them, as he had no money to spend, and
the only shops that tempted him were the book-
sellers' and jewellers'. He liked precious stones
for their sparkle and colour, and wished he could
be a Rajah or Indian potentate, and go daily
lecked with strings of gems. If he had wished
to join the Club to which his intimates be-
longed, Mr. Stevenson would have paid his
entrance fee, and provided him with funds to
enjoy himself there ; but a Princes Street Club
Louis despised. He preferred rather vagabondish
haunts of his own in Edinburgh, but the Savile
Club in London, of which he was a member,
he found congenial. His Edinburgh hero, John
Nicholson, goes to Colette's, which had nothing
much to recommend it, for it had an * unsavoury
interior,' where John found several members of
the Junior Bar, not very sober, sitting round a
table at a coarse meal served on a dirty table-
238

EDINBURGH DAYS

cloth. But Colette, being a contraband hotel-
keeper, had an attraction. When they had all
been marched off to the police office for drinking
at this arch shebeener's, they adjourned to one
of the crestfallen company's rooms in Castle
Street, * where (for that matter) they might
have had quite as good a supper and far better
drink than in the dangerous paradise from which
they had been routed.' Louis took this sketch
from his own experience. He used to enjoin all
members of the Republic to affirm that he had
been in their realm, if they were asked by his
parents if Louis had been in talking late the
previous evening, and many a time when his
latch-key was used at unwarranted hours, he
laid the blame on our smoking-room.

When plans for a tour with his friends were dis-
cussed by the winter's fire, and the projects and
probable expenses told to Mr. Stevenson, he gave
his hearty sanction and liberal funds, so his once
upon a time paltry two shillings and sixpence a
week must not be harshly judged, or Louis's
father thought to have been unduly stingy.

' It was a comfortable thought to me that I had
a father,' Louis says in his tale of the College
Magazine, when he saw, despite his ' lips smiling
publicly,' that this literary essay was to be a

239

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

grim fiasco. When failure came, he says, ' the
necessary interview with my father passed off
not amiss.'

Mr. Stevenson loved his only son, and that love
caused him much disquietude. Both love and
duty made him anxious to guide and keep his
boy on the right road. Louis had, however, a
mania for by-paths which were not, unfortun-
ately, in the * narrow way * in which his father
wished him to walk. Once, when Louis's con-
duct caused a serious breach, Mr. Stevenson, to
recall him from what he deemed ' the broad
road,' stopped the liberal funds he had given
to his son. The good man was puzzled that his
prodigal was not starved into returning. On
the contrary, he continued to fare sumptuously,
Hke the rich man, if not spending his substance
in riotous living. An audacious friend of Louis's,
who knew the whys and wherefores of the father's
conduct, told Mr. Stevenson that he knew that
if Louis, for want of funds, had to rough it, and
fell ill, Mr. Stevenson would reproach himself,
so he had advanced him some money, fully
assured parental displeasure would melt, and the
engineer repay him with interest. It says much
for Mr. Stevenson's generosity and fairness of
judgment that when he had looked on the

EDINBURGH DAYS

matter from his son's point of view, he repaid
the money advanced, recalled the unrepentant
prodigal, and killed the fatted calf.

Anything the least out of the common in fact
or fancy attracted Louis's attention, and he was
always pursuing some chimera. Two queer
quirks of his are noted and known. He once
knew a girl born on a twenty-ninth of February,
who constantly complained that she had only a
birthday ever>^ four years, so Louis gave her as
a present the 13th of November, as he said he
had no further use for it. He drew up a deed
in due legal form, and so endowed her with an
annual feast-day. This Adelaide M. Ide, so
strangely gifted with a birthday, died lately in
Samoa. His step-daughter, also ' his friend and
scribe,' tells how her mother and his cousin,
Graham Balfour, were proposing in Samoa to
exchange consciences. ' Louis was watching
the transaction with interest, and suggested
that the business might be developed, and that
a trade journal might be started, where con-
sciences could be advertised for sale or exchange.
He himself, he added, might be very glad to
avail himself of such facilities, and he wondered
what his own conscience would look like in
print. " Oh," said his cousin, '' let me try."

9 241

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

" For sale, a conscience, half calf, slightly soiled,
gilt-edged (or shall we say uncut ?), scarce and
curious." '

This was the kind of drollery Louis loved of
old. Endless were his freakish fancies. After
the Inland Voyage had been successfully accom-
plished, he was full of a project to buy a barge,
and saunter through the canals of Europe,
Venice being the far-off terminus. A few select
shareholders in this scheme were chosen, mostly
artists, for the barge plan was projected in the
mellow autumnal days at a painters' camp in
Fontainebleau Forest. The company were then
all in the bloom of their youth. They were to
paint fame-enduring pictures, as they leisurely
sailed through life and Europe, and when bowed,
grey -bearded, bald-headed men, they were to
cease their journeyings at Venice. There, before
St. Mark's, a crowd of clamorously eager picture-
dealers and lovers of art were to be waiting to
purchase the wonderful work of the wanderers.
The scene in the piazza of St. Mark's, on the
barge's arrival, the throng of buyers, the hoary-
headed artists, tottering under the weight of
canvases, was pictured by the historian of the
voyage. The barge was bought, but bankruptcy
stared the shareholders in the face. The patrons

242

EDINBURGH DAYS

of art of that day had no leanings towards the
work of the shareholders, and no first breath of
success had come yet to the one author among
them. The barge was arrested, and with it
the canoes which had earned an immortal fame
through the Arethusa's pen. They were re-
deemed by Cigarette from a debtor's prison,
the barge sold, and the company wound up.

At this time he had much of his future work
simmering in his brain. One evening he broke
out into a species of Jekyl and Hyde plot.
Deacon Brodie, the hypocritical villain, who
appeared as a pillar of the Church, and an able
craftsman before his fellow-townsmen, and was
really a gambler and burglar, suggested to
Tusitala the two-sidedness of human character,
* commingled out of good and evil,' the smug
front to the world, the villain behind the mask.
The story of Burke and Hare's atrocious murders
had a fascination for him too, and so had many
other tales of old Edinburghers, or tales of
Edinburgh itself ; for the city is a grey recorder
of unforgotten history. ' The great North Road,'
full of highwaymen, was to be the scene and
name of a future novel. Louis's route north, if
I remember aright, was to be by Berwick and
York. The London Road, an outlet from

243

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Edinburgh, suggested the commencement of
the journey. On a sloppy winter's day Louis
stopped to admire the name, ' Val de Travers,'
which was then printed in brass on asphalt pave-
ments. It pleased him to see that, though the
name was trodden under foot, it shone in letters
of gold from out of the mud. He said he would
use that undimmable name for a hero of his in
some story, and imagined him in various situa-
tions. He had a long memory for all sorts of
things which had arrested his attention, but he
must have forgotten Val de Travers, for he has
never raised him from out of the pavement and
set him on our shelves.

* This is a poison bad world for the romancer,
this Anglo-Saxon world. I usually get out of it
by not having any woman in it at all ; but when
I remember I had the Treasure of Franchard
refused as unfit for a family magazine, I feel
despair weigh upon my wrists,' he complained
from Vailima.

Very early in his career, some of his boon com-
panions lamented that he was somewhat of a
cowardly humbug, for he judiciously kept his
Jekyl reputation so much before the innocent
public that the Hyde in him, which they knew,
was never suspected. They said they could not
244

EDINBURGH DAYS

find a passage in any of his books with even a
suggestion of Hyde in it. They persisted that
he had so cultivated a pure Dr. Jekyl style, that
he could not abandon it if he wished, and they,
though not all penmen, could write a novel
with a more than doubtful plot better than he,
the rising author. Their scorn of his Jekyl
mask, their boast that they could beat him with
his own weapons, put him on his mettle. He
avoided their company for some weeks, and
laboured sedulously at a novel which would out-
Herod Herod. He laid it before them, and they
were startled with its strength, its terribleness,
its outrageous blackness of human depravity.
He was radiant : he had surprised them. The
MS. book was kept by one ' life-long friend ' of
his. He had it bound as the History of Peru.
The efforts of Louis's companions, which were
school-girl reading in comparison, figured on
the same shelf as the History of Mexico. They
looked so sallow and dull, no one, said their
possessor, would take them from their place.
Comparatively recently they still existed. Louis,
though flattered at the time by their favourable
criticisms, bitterly regretted he had entered the
list on such a foul tournament, and asked for his
work back to commit it to the flames, for fear

245

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

that it should ever become pubUc. But the * life-
long friend ' being of a speculative, tormenting
turn, held to the manuscript. He said he could
blackmail the author whenever he wished by
threats of publication. Louis, to the end of his
days, pled in vain for the reams he had sullied
his pen over, and wisely resolved never again to
play the part of Hyde with the tell-tale indelible-
ness of ink.

Louis had never any inclination for outdoor
sports or pastimes. Riding along the hard roads
round Edinburgh did not strike his fancy, though
in Samoa, Mr. Bazett Haggard says, he was the
second best rider on the island, and he enjoyed
nothing better than a gallop on his horse. Skat-
ing was the one outdoor amusement he enjoyed,
though he never became very proficient at it.
Like a crab he could move backwards, but a
straightforward course on the ice took him a long
time to accompUsh. He liked watching others
at their intricate figure-cutting, or skimming
along in swallow-like flights.

The clear exhilarating air and the good spirits
of every one contented him. Town ponds he did
not care to frequent, but when Duddingston bore
he abandoned work, and spent his days there.
He watched the curlers, though his interest in

246

EDINBURGH DAYS

the rink was not in the destination of the boom-
ing stones, but in the jovial faces of the players,
and the broad Scotch terms which seemed part
and parcel of the roaring game. One winter of
continued frost we went daily out of Edinburgh
by train to skate on an unfrequented sheet of
ice, and Louis joined us. It was at the village
in which my father had been bom and reared.
His remaining brother used to watch for us as
the Edinburgh train arrived, and Louis, quick
to notice and sympathize, observed how the old
man's kindly face lit up with pleasure when he
spied us. Louis complained he had no distinc-
tive career, not even a surname of his own, at
Bathgate ; for our Uncle Sandy never could
remember his name, and called him ' the poor
shilpit laddie,' and the village schoolboys, who
came to slide, pointed him out as the ' foreigner '
or ' yon skinny ane.' WTien he took off his cloak,
and began to warm himself by gliding on the
black ice, he looked very sHght among the buirdly
curlers.

' Why,' said he one day, ' does that dear old
gentleman, your uncle, think I 've the appetite of
a prize-fighter, or is he a cannibal ? He piles my
plate with corned beef and keeps it piled. All

your other friends who go in with you to what he

247

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

calls " tea," and which I call a cold banquet, he
allows to eat, drink, and be merry in their own
way, but he keeps watching and stuffing me.
To-day he says he thinks I 'm fatter.* We ex-
plained that our uncle, having befriended our
father when he was an impecunious student in
Edinburgh, had ever a generous solicitude for
any he thought struggling to keep themselves
at college, and he could not be convinced that
* that poor shilpit-Hke laddie,' as he called his
nephew's friend, was not an impecunious student
of foreign extraction. It was in vain we told him
Louis had a doting father and mother alive, and
was a born and bred Edinburgher. 'They
might give him a great-coat,' suggested our
uncle. * Poor creature ! I don't like to see him
with only that old curtain to wrap round him.'

Louis was fond of walking, but golf did not
strike him as an attractive addition to that exer-
cise. It appeared to him very poor amusement
to interrupt meditation or talk to hit a ball, and
he was an unsympathetic listener only when his
friends began discussing their strokes when their
day's sport was done. Golf, too, in these Edin-
burgh days of his, was more confined to Scot-
land. It was then a Calvinistic sport, stem and
hardy. Wind-shaven whins swallowed up balls,

248

EDINBURGH DAYS

and there were no lawn-like inland courses with
green velvet turf. If Louis had fancied it at all,
he would have liked it when it was played on
the sea links, with the tingle of the salt on one's
lips, but out of doors his attention was all given
to word painting. He had, when a boy, summer-
ing at North Berwick, followed Robert Chambers,
junior, round the links ; and years after, wishing
to help a friend who wanted to contribute to
Chambers' Journal, he wrote him the following
letter :—

* Dear Sir, — I do not know if you ever ob-
ser\'ed me, but I have more than once followed
your triumphant progress round a golfing green,
and though this would hardly stand for an
introduction, I dare say you know me by name.
The paper enclosed is by a friend of mine, and
it seemed to me very suitable to Chambers'
Journal. Will you look at it and let me know ?
This is a very incongruous letter altogether.
The last incongruity is that I should put this
infinitesimal rag of paper into such a mighty
continent as the envelope. — Yours truly,

' Robert Louis Stevenson.'

When the daylight visibly increased, after the
new year, Louis liked to wander about his native

249

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

city. The Calton Hill, he held, was a compre-
hensive place from which to contemplate it, for
then you had Arthur's Seat with its * house of
kings ' at its feet, and the long ridge of the old
town bristling with spires — a romance in stone
and lime from the Castle to Holy rood. The
beauty of the scene in sunshine or haar pleased
him, however much he complained of its scowling
weather. On Sunday afternoons we went fur-
ther afield. Duddingston village, lying at the
back of the leonine green hill, away from the city's
traffic, found special favour in his sight. One
day, as he looked down on it from the road by
Dunsappie, he expressed a sudden desire to have
rooms there, in its peaceful out-of-world quiet,
and waken to the song of birds. This poetic
sentiment his father nipped in the bud, by tell-
ing him he could hearken (season providing) to
the first low matin chirp of early feathered
singers in his own room at Heriot Row, for the
gardens there were full of thrushes and black-
birds. Rest and Be Thankful, on Corstorphine
Hill, was our usual Sunday walk — that well-
fended crook on its wooded slope, where David
and Alan parted.

The Hawes Inn, Queensferry, which figures in

the Antiquary, also known as the place where
250

EDINBURGH DAYS

Louis's hero David was ' Kidnapped,' was
another of Robert Louis Stevenson's favoured
resorts. The travellers crossing the Forth Bridge,
taking a bird's-eye view of that hostelry, have
disturbed the privacy of its hawthorn-hedged
garden. Louis liked it for its retiredness and old-
world air. He never saw it after the railway
had disturbed it by bridging the Forth. The
Dean Bridge, across which we invariably went
on Sunday, was to Louis an unfailing source of
pleasure. Looking over the west side (and he
always would pause to look) lay the village the
town had passed over, still a village of mills,
with the roar of the weir, and the river lapping
close up to the main-street doorways. On the
east side there was the view of the terraced
valley on which the fashionable places and
crescents of houses had defiantly turned their
backs, and, immediately below the bridge, a
white mill and a dark mill lade. ' The dusty
miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling
water, hearkens to the turning wheel, and the
birds whisthng about the shed, and perhaps
whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony,
for all the world as if Edinburgh w^ere still the
old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were

still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so

251

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

in the green country',' writes Louis, speaking of
his favourite * little rural village of Dean,' which
has not been smothered in the annihilating arms
of greedy Edinburgh, but by its lowly site still
survives in the heart of its west end. The mill
of Greenbank is gone. With the quiet of Hawes
Inn, it has fallen before fin de sihle improve-
ments.

Louis was never exiled from his old haunts,
however. He had a Peter Ibbetson knack of
dreaming true. The fickle South did not obliter-
ate from his memory the skinning nor'-easter
we ofttimes met on that bridge, blowing direct
from the ocean. Catriona lived somewhere near
the village of Dean, and David Balfour found his
way thither. When he sent David and Alan
eastwards from Silvermills, one feels, as one goes
with them to the sandy dunes of GuUane, the
hale sting of the wind, sees the colouring crudely
bright in the caller air, and breathes with them
the invigorating atmosphere of that coast. Louis
always dreamed true. Sometimes it was of his
yachting days on the west coast, of the heat
of a Highland day when it is hot, such a heat
as his Highland fugitives experienced when they
baked ' like scones on a girdle,' imprisoned on
the rock in the glen by the watchful soldiers.

252

EDINBURGH DAYS

* Very odd these identities of sensation and the
world of connotations impHed,' he writes from
VaiHma, when the rain from the westward be-
spattering his verandah had sent over him * a
wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless
emotion ' and thoughts of Scotland. He com-
plained that though he lived a voluntary exile
he had his * head filled with the beastly place all
the time.' That morning the smell of the peats
came back to him, the sentiment of the Highland
scenery, ' the rain on the wet moorland belike,'
and he felt ' the romance of the past, and that
indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's
heart.' His last two heroes lived in his grey
town, or sought shelter near by among his well-
loved hills. He recalled these familiar scenes in
all their vividness, so that his hope was in a
manner realized ; he beheld again in dying those
' Hills of Home.' Truly he sang—

• The tropics vanish, meseems that I
From Halker side, from topmost Allermuir,
Or steep Caerketton dreaming, gaze again.'

With this tenacious imagination of his, this Peter
Ibbetson hidden gift which he could exercise at
will, he never was exiled ; however far in body
he was from the land where his forefathers slept,
he aye had a blink of his ' ain countrie.' ' It

253

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

is a singular thing that I should live here in
the South Seas,' he says in a letter to Mr. Barrie,
a few weeks before his death, ' and yet my
imagination so continually inhabit the cold, old
huddle of grey hills from which we came.'

The glimpses of country and fields seen from
the heart of Exlinburgh were always noted and
appreciated by Louis. The closes, which were
like gaps in tall cliffs, were as frames to upright
vistas of the sea and the Fife Lomonds. Or
escaping down from the Parliament House after
breathing ' dust and bombazine ' for a few hours,
and finding it the most arduous form of idleness,
Louis, rejoicing in the clear pungent air, would
descend from the Mound, stirred with delight at
the sight of the Highland mountains, hoary with
their first powdering of snow. The sights which
gave him a feeling of freedom from town fetters —
the smell of the plough in his nostrils, the cry of
the moorland birds in winter shelter, the ample
leisure at his disposal to grind at his apprentice-
ship of letters in the seventies — offered some
measure of compensation for a climate which he
found so uncongenial, though in the long run it
would doubtless have been of more enduring
benefit than the deceptive seductiveness of the
luscious South. His ' first draught of considera-

254

EDINBURGH DAYS

tion * for his literary ability was when he was
asked to be one of the four editors of the Edin-
burgh University Magazine, of which he tells us
in one of his retrospective papers. There were
some well-known names among the contributors
which should have helped this venture to live
longer. Professor Blackie, Principal Tulloch, Dr.
Joseph Bell, that able wielder of pen or lancet,
and some other standard names. Its failure
sent Louis back, as he says, ' from the printed
author to the manuscript student,' and but for
Roads, Ordered South, and some other short
pieces, we had to wait a few years till he com-
piled his Inland Voyage. Treasure Island, written
some six years after, was the first ship that
brought home any weight of gold to his treasury.
He took his journey in the Areihusa in 1876, and
wrote of it in the following months. That winter,
too, he was planning further vagrant travels —
this time to the Cevennes. In 1875 his door
plate, engraved ' R. L. Stevenson, Advocate,*
was put up in Heriot Row. Neither his legal
studies nor walking the boards of the Parliament
House, waiting for hire, interfered with his
literary work, and the long vacations gave him
time for nomadic rambles. He had a deed box
in the Parliament House, a gown and a wig.

255

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Occasionally he filled the two latter, but gradu-
ally they, like the box, remained empty. At
first, when all was new, the old-world air of the
Law Courts, the quiet seclusion in the library
below, the legal feet, the novelty of dressing up
in the guise of an advocate, attracted him. Once
he was told a clerk was looking for him to give
him a brief. He tore off his advocate's robes
and fled, and was only lured back, some while
after, when his friends confessed the brief was a
myth.

Notwithstanding his bad health, he seemed
able to take holidays in a ver}^ Crusoe fashion,
winter or summer. He enjoyed walking tours,
and went through Ayrshire in mid-winter. In
these years, despite his complaints, he was really
fairly unfettered. He had time for the liberty
he craved for. Knapsack on back he would
realize his song, and start off with the —

'Jolly heaven above and the byway nigh.'

The Courts rose in March for a month or more,
and August and September were hoHday times.
Louis had no cases to work up, no legal pot-
boiling to do in the way of reports, no work as
locum tenats to a Sheriff', such as the Junior Bar

looked for hungrily. If he had not been forced to
256

t^Ng^g

EDINBURGH DAYS

leave the tale half told, his knowledge of Scots
Law would have enabled him to try to con-
demn Archie Weir in due legal form, and to see
that Lord Hermiston conducted himself on the
bench as beseemed a Lord of Session. He
studied well as a law student, and had a know-
ledge and grasp of dry technicalities which no
one credited him with, for no one ever saw him
show any interest in legal proceedings. He never
pled, and did no more than look into the Parlia-
ment House to see a friend or read a book, once
his gown was no novelty.

Lord Braxfield's portrait was not bequeathed
in Louisas day to the hall of the Courts of Justice
where now it rests, but Louis studied it when it
was in the Raeburn Exhibition. His freshness
of remembrance, his knack of making people see
from his point of vision, stood him in good stead
when he made Braxfield into Hermiston. The
correct legal knowledge he somehow imbibed
during his fitful appearances in wig and gown
shows he must have given some attention to it,
and that knowledge of his recognized profession
is reflected in every line of Weir of Hermiston.

257

TRAVEL SONGS

459

'Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me ;
Give me the jolly heaven above,

And the byway nigh mc.
Let the blow fall soon or late,

Let what will be o'er me,

Give the face of earth around

And the road before me.'

— Songs of Travel.

260

CHAPTER XI

TRAVEL SONGS

In one of his essays on a walking tour in Ayr-
shire, Louis speaks of Maybole and the ballad
of 'Johnne Faa,' the king of Scottish Gipsies
and Earl of Little Eg>^pt, by a charter from
James v. The Lady of Cassilis, in her high
turret, heard the Eastern wanderers sing, and
their music arousing old memories and the wild
blood in her, she left her husband's castle to
follow them. ' Even,' says Louis, ' if the tale
be not true of this or that lady, or this or that
old tower, it is true in the essence of all men and
women ; for all of us, sometime or other, hear the
gipsies singing, over all of us is the glamour cast.
Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire. Most
go, and are brought back again like Lady
Cassilis. A few of the tribe of Waring go and
are seen no more ; only now and again, at
spring-time, when the gipsies' song is afloat in
the amethyst evening, we can catch their voices

in the glee.' Louis's hearing was alert. The

261

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Romany music sounded in his ears, and he cast
ofif the strait jacket of convention, arose from the
feather bed of civilization, and set off when the
first breath of spring reached the North. His
cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, was an artist, and
his comrade Cigarette had a brother who Hved
part of the year at Fontainebleau studying the
same profession. The two Edinburgh advocates,
glad to be rid of their little-worn gowns and wigs,
joined their kinsmen in the refreshing greenery
of the forest at some painters' camp which Louis
has so well described in his papers on Fontaine-
bleau. * Our society,' he says, * was full of high
spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth.
The few elder men who joined us were still young
at heart, and took the key from their companions.
It was a good place and a good life for any
naturally-minded youth ; better yet for the
student of painting, and perhaps, best of all,
for the student of letters.'

The attraction to the artists at Barbizon, when
they pitched their camp at Siron's, was Millet.
The great man had just died, Louis says, when
first he went there. He was at Barbizon before
Millet's death, but perhaps not as a resident for
any length of time. Mr. Will Low, the American
artist, speaking of his student days in Paris, says :
262

EDINBURGH DAYS

* In the summer, 1874, the two Stevensons, as
they were known, the cousins Robert Louis and
Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (the author of
the recent Life of Velasquez, and the well-known
writer on art) were in Barbizon. Millet was
not much more than a name to my friends that
day when we talked over our coffee in the garden
at Siron's Inn. They had seen little or none of
his work. I ventured across the road, knocked
at the little green door, and asked permission
to bring my friends, which was accorded.' The
Stevensons had been insisting that all the great
artists were passed away. Mr. Low held that
giants still walked the earth. He clinched his
argument by taking them to Millet's. * In half
an hour,' he says, * I was witness of an object-
lesson, of which the teacher was serenely un-
conscious. Of my complete triumph when we left
there was no doubt, though one of my friends
rather begged the question by insisting I had
taken an unfair advantage, and that, as he ex-
pressed it, " it was not in the game, in an ordinary
discussion between gentlemen, concerning minor
poets, to drag Shakespeare in, in that way." '

At Fontainebleau Louis roved at will, or
loafed in the sunshine, read and wrote little and

talked much of an evening, for he had able

263

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

antagonists to grapple with in argument. Mr.
Low says : * If Louis Stevenson was the most
wonderful talker in the world, as he certainly
was, then certainly " Bob " Stevenson was
second to him.' But many who knew both these
gipsy-looking Stevenson cousins in these days,
gave Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson the palm
for being more original and spontaneous, and not
so persistent in his search after startling themes,
but lighting on them unawares. Mr. Low goes
on to say that if Robert Louis had died then,
or never accomplished anything in his Hfe, he
would have regarded him as a great and wonder-
ful personage with the same feeling as he has
for him to-day. Mr. Low asserts to an editor
of an American magazine that ' young Stevenson
exercised over himself, and all the others of their
circle, the strangest kind of magnetic power.'
They all felt, as he did, that they were in the
presence of an intellect far beyond them. There
was something akin to worship in the feeling
entertained by them for Stevenson, and yet
Low admits that he and Louis were always
quarreUing on all possible subjects ; ' they
loved each other, yet they argued and fought
continually.' Mr. Low had more discernment

than most, for, among the men who now sit in

264

EDINBURGH DAYS

Weir of Hermiston's place on the bench, or plead
before the judges of to-day, and who knew
Louis in these his Edinburgh days, I have heard
many candidly own they neither particularly
liked Ix)uis, nor ever dreamed that he would rise
to any eminence. He hid his lights a good deal
under a bushel ; frank as he appeared in his
talk, there was a vein of hidden secretiveness,
half bashful, about him, though he was not
troubled with national shyness. In his legal
days he seldom mentioned his patient toiling
for master>^ over his chosen craft. He fostered
the idea that he was a consummate idler, light-
hearted and thoughtless, sadly wanting in sta-
bility, with no object in life but to * gang his
ain gait,' and his ways were out of the common
ken. Some of his fellow-artists, too, at Barbizon
do not recall any special admiration for Robert
Louis Stevenson then ; for, like his shrewd
Edinburgh confreres, men of culture and dis-
cernment, they did not bestow much notice on
him. His ability to weld his ideas into specific
language made him a peerless speaker, and of
an evening his thoughts, translated into decora-
tive words, entertained them when they Hstened.
They were all young, self-absorbed, and an
Artist of Letters was not held of much account

265

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

among those whose thoughts were given to the
palette and brush. Louis's mannerisms and
oddities in dress were quite commonplace in a
colony of unconventional beings, and there also,
as in Edinburgh, he was not a general favourite.
Even the friends of his youth, who knew him
well, liked him for his lovable, genial gaiety,
and were attracted to him by his eager enthu-
siasm more than by any forewarning that their
comrade was Hkely to be distinguished. They
looked on him with affection, such as they might
concede to a child, half in pity for the irre-
sponsible evanescence of its spirits, yet liking its
merry carelessness. Sidney Colvin, speaking of
Louis when they first met, says : * He was at
that time a lad of twenty-two, with his powers
not yet set, nor his way of life determined. But
to know him was to recognize at once that here
was a young genius of whom great things might
be expected. A slender, boyish presence, with
a graceful, somewhat fantastic bearing, and a
singular power and attraction in the eyes and
smile, were the signs that first impressed you ;
and the impression was quickly confirmed and
deepened by the charm of his talk, which was
irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, and not
less full of matter than of mirth.'
266

EDINBURGH DAYS

So it seems some instinctively foresaw, and
some, who were by no means dull of perception,
were blind to his future and were not captivated
by him in the present. Let it be remembered
that in Edinburgh Louis Stevenson, during his
quarter of a century or more of residence there,
was little known. He kept aloof from people
and pleasures in his own circle, forming an
enthusiastic admiration and worship for a few.
' Yon daft laddie Stevenson,* a janitor at the
Parliament House spoke of him as, and many
who knew him by sight, in ' his own romantic
town,' as Thomas Stevenson's son, thought it an
apt description of the youth who ran counter to
all accepted formulas and customs, and prided
himself on being a bit of a Pariah in the stately
city of his birth.

Louis was always more liked by his seniors.

Those of his own age, or younger, were not

tolerant of fondness for talking. His charming

fluency of speech prejudiced many against him,

for in company in these days he strained to

attract attention by his power of eloquence, and

only a few knew how excellent and sympathetic

a hstener he could be. He attitudinized in his

twenties as a sparkling, flighty speaker, and

those of his own years had no patience with his

267

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

sudden raptures, his almost hysterical sensitive-
ness over a sad story or a too realistic drama.
In the artists' camps, however, they understood
his changeable moods, his ecstasies, his ebulli-
tions, and if a phonograph had been in Siron's,
at Barbizon, or Chevillon's, at Gretz, when he,
invigorated by the outdoor life in the spacious
woodlands, talked till morning, that phonograph
would have given us much of his strange sur-
mises racily worded. In his Vailima Letters
there is an unpeptonised strength of expression
which recalls to those who knew him his every-
day style of speech.

If a phonograph could have recalled his voice,
the familiar accent of his country and his mind,
untoned into the smooth cadence of words he
put before us in print, a cinematograph would
have been the only means to recall his appearance.
He was all life and movement, and his expression
ever changed as he spoke. His bright but wan
oval face lit up then, the wine of youth (for he
never would have been old if he had lived his
allotted threescore and ten) mounted to his
thin cheeks, and the glory of soul radiated from
his beaming black eyes. Then the mercurial
movements of his hands were part of his speech ;
they were emphasis, interrogation marks, italics

263

EDINBURGH DAYS

to his phrases. It is singular that, living, as he
did, for many a week together in spring and
autumn among artists, none ever sketched him,
though they were on the constant outlook for
striking subjects for their brush. Notwith-
standing Mr. Low's eulogy, and his belief that
his fellows regarded Robert Louis Stevenson
* with something akin to worship,' none of them
sought to immortalize him on what each hoped
were their immortal canvases. I have heard
many who were of that jovial crew there, say
that neither Louis Stevenson's unique face nor
his art of talking impressed them much. They
noted his feebleness of frame, and liked his
courageous gaiety in the face of physical weak-
ness. ' I wonder,' he asks, ' if ever any one had
more energy upon so little strength ? ' One
portrait was done of him at Fontainebleau, not
on canvas, but on the white walls of Chevillon's
salon at Gretz. It was a caricature, but at the
same time an unmistakable likeness. Louis was
portrayed shivering on the brink of the river,
preparing to dive, but shrinking from the leap,
his shoulders shrugged, and his hands drooping
limply from the wrists in protesting supplication.
The figure was outlined in black. It accentuated

his deplorable leanness, added a few inches to

269

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

the length of his hair, and made it stray in
unkempt locks over his brow.

Louis in these days was no sketcher. The
Studio gave in the winter number 1896-97 some
pictures of his, clever outlines, some done, it is
said, in Davos. Whether he had cultivated an
ability to wield his pencil later, as he learned
the flageolet, or whether his hostages to fortune
helped him, I know not. But at Barbizon the
artists* community offered the two aliens in their
camp, the Cigarette and the Arethusa, a prize
for the best landscape. It had been discovered
that Cigarette could draw the old-fashioned
valentine — heart pierced by Cupid's dart — but
the Arethusa's anatomy was undoubtedly faulty
and the Blind Boy's arrow in his hands under-
went serpentine contortions. Still Arethusa said
he could draw, at any rate better than the
Cigarette, and so the contest was arranged.
The luxuriant tangle of the forest, the glades,
or some woodland veteran standing out alone
in leafy prominence, the competitors refused to
attempt. Finally, a wall was fixed on as their
motif. Most of the onlookers backed the
Arethusa ; the ferv^our with which he entered
into criticism of his friends' pictures, his very
looks which made him appear as one of them-

270

EDINBURGH DAYS

selves, inclined them to believe he would win.
He settled down to his task, smiling and con-
fident, while Cigarette, his pipe well between
his teeth, sat silent, and steadily worked. His
rival chattered as he glanced at the motif, and
had hardly a hand left to draw with as he
flourished his pencil Hke a conductor's wand,
and used the other hand as a species of telescope
to focus with, as he had seen others do. The
result was that Louis lost. His wall was quite
incomprehensible, while my brother had got his
clearly built and the stones put in, in a heavy-
handed, firm manner, properly shaded too.
This primitive prize study was called from its
stolidity the Scotch Dyke. Stevenson was dis-
appointed, but owned he was honestly beaten.
The artists encouraged these two novices at
their trade to continue their studies, but Robert
Louis Stevenson's work remained ludicrously
hopeless, and he never could be taught to outline
his wounded heart and its damaging dart aright.
Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, in The Edinburgh Academy
Chronicle of March 1895, speaking of a visit to
Robert Louis Stevenson at Skerryvore in 1885
and subsequent years, says : * He was then very
ill, but his beautiful gaiety never failed him, and

his own sufferings seemed but to make him the

271

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

more tender to his friends. He invented many
pastimes for himself and them. At one time
he modelled little clay figures, beginning them
in one intention, and then humorously changing
it to suit their changing appearance. He could
not draw a stroke'

Louis, if his fingers refused to sketch, could
always portray in words, and he had a special
gift in fixing on appropriate names. Among
them in the forest came one called Violet le Due.
This man pricked up his ears when he heard the
English colony speak his name at table. Louis
saw this, so he called a meeting of his country-
men and those who spoke the mother tongue,
explained how Violet le Due hearkened sus-
piciously to the sound of his name, but how
without a breach of good manners they could
continue to remark on his work if they would
but adopt his suggestion. Violet le Due would
have, when mentioned among the English-speak-
ing community, to discard his ducal coronet, and
be known in future as Primrose the Earl, by
which equally spring-like title they discussed
him freely, while he within earshot remained
happily unconscious.

Many of the artists were musical, but Louis
Stevenson took no part in their impromptu
272

A

EDINBURGH DAYS

concerts. He liked their songs and rattling re-
frains, but he was no singer, nor had he much
of an ear for music. He would attempt to pick
out a tune with one finger on the piano. He
says he had a rudimentary acquaintance with
* Auld Lang Syne ' and the ' Wearing of the
Green.' He makes David and his forebear at
Pilrig have a musical ear, for the Laird received
David Balfour ' in the midst of learned works
and musical instruments, for he was not only
a deep philosopher, but much of a musician.*
Flageolet-playing, a later accomplishment, or
one hidden like his sketching, was one of his
impulsive whims, — an experiment undertaken to
see if he Hked making music, as he had once
before experimented to see if he could like the
cageful of unrestful avadavats.

A fancy for gardening, that * purest of human
pleasures,' came on him in his later years, and
he found it, as Bacon said, * the greatest refresh-
ment to the spirit of man.' In the well-planted
garden at Swanston he took no practical interest
in the growth of the flowers till, in course of the
season, their fully developed beauty burst on him,
and they sweetened the air with their perfume.
But at Vailima the gardening fever came on him
strongly. In a letter to Dr. Bakewell he said :

§ 273

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON S

* However, I am off work this month, and occupy
myself in weeding cacao, papa chases, and the
like. My long, silent contests in the forest have
had a strange effect on me.' Much of his
gardening struggles are recorded in Vailima
Letters, He had the tropical rapidity of vegeta-
tion to contend with, and a primeval growth of
weeds to subdue. He liked difficulties, for in
spite of his physical disabilities he had a stubborn
doggedness about him. A long-cared-for garden
never tempted him to adopt Robert Young's
trade, but the untutored wealth of his own
domain incited him to action, and, like the
settlers, he set to work on the hard task to tame
the wilderness.

At Fontainebleau he entered sympathetically
into tlie artists' struggles, and he envied them
their complacent contentment, whether their
day's work had been successful or not, comparing
it with the reproaches he inflicted on himself if
after labouring with his pen, his pages were not
up to his ideal. His comrades, especially the
foreigners, at Siron's or Chevillon's, were suavely
polite, and Louis liked polish, French or other-
wise. He found, however, that when a wind
of adversity blew, his own ' brither Scots ' were,

like the Douglases, ' tender and true.' He was
274

EDINBURGH DAYS

a strange mixture of nervous, womanish fears,
along with that braveness which enabled him
to face ill-health smilingly and reap a harvest of
happiness in the Land of Counterpane, a task
which would have baffled most strong men. In
his forest wanderings he had encountered midges,
which distracted him sadly when he was enjoy-
ing visions, searching new ways to enter that
House Beautiful of his dreams. The forest also
hid other enemies in ambush — the tics which
brush off the ferns on to passers-by. He ac-
quired one of these, and in an anxious horror
rushed into the salon crying that a wart had
appeared on his arm which, like the ' Fat Boy '
in Pickiinck, was * visibly swelling.* They told
him laughingly it was a blood-sucking forest
inhabitant^ at which the highly strung Louis
became panic-stricken. Cummy often had seen
these exaggerated terrors take possession of the
small boy she had nursed, but even the profusely
commiserating foreign artists present laughed
as they saw their gay Stevenson in tears. They
thought he was so affected for their amusement,
but this frenzy was no Stevensonian trick to
attract attention. The first to realize that
Louis's uncontrolled fear was not mockery was
his trusty friend the Cigarette. He tried to

275

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

reassure the distraught Arethusa by teUing him
that a Hke fate befell many, that Taureau, the
bull-dog, survived, though daily he came in with
a crop of vampirish tics on him, which made his
master and Coco, the monkey, pay him such
close attention. Finally, he extracted the foreign
body from the weeping Arethusa, who was duly
grateful. But it was a subject the blithe R. L. S.
would not take a comic view of, for when the
artists jested on it later he paled at the mention
of the scene.

Taureau, the bull-dog, recalls how Robert
Louis's beggarly clothes exceeded the usual
degree of artistic nondescriptness. The dog was
ill, and heat and care were the prescription.
Madame Chevillon was attentive to her four-
legged boarder. She saw him shiver, and the
kindly Frenchwoman looked for something to
wrap him in. She took what came nearest her
hand, which happened to be Louis's well-known
velveteen jacket. It was a warm August day,
and he enjoyed the freedom of sitting without
his coat, and had flung his outer garment on to
the bench. Wlien evening came he hunted for
his old, derided friend in every conceivable
place. Madame had not seen it. She was
tearful and dispirited over the dog. Louis

376

EDINBURGH DAYS

continued his search till the waning day brought
the artists back from their work, and Taureau's
master went straight to visit his sick dog. The
velveteen was next the patient's skin, the ragged
lining outside. He flung the unsightly wrap
away from his favourite, and Louis spied his
jacket on the floor. He was indignant at the
use it had been put to, but Madame and Taur-
eau's master held it was an insult that so valu-
able a dog had been equipped in such rags.

When he first knew Fontainebleau, Barbizon
was the favoured artists' haunt, but its selectness
and freedom having been spoilt by invaders, two
men set out to look for other quarters, and came
back reporting well of Gretz. There the river
and the boats were specially novel attractions, —
' something to do,' they said, ' when feeling
averse to work.' ' The consistent idler,' as
Louis called himself, to disguise the fact that he
was the hardest worker among them, 'had no
craving, like his brethren, after that something
to do.' All he wanted was to walk, to dream,
to see, and to store his mind with what he saw.
Speaking of the bathers and canoes at Gretz, he
says they told a tale ' of a society that has an
eye to pleasure. Perhaps for that very reason I
can recall no such enduring ardours, no such

277

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

glories of exhilaration as among the solemn
groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This
" something to do " is a great enemy to joy ;
it is a way out of it ; you wreak your high spirits
on some cut-and-dry employment and behold
them gone.'

Gretz unawares became an important place to
Louis. It was, so to speak, a cross-road on his
way of life, and from there he took a route which
led him away from the home and his friends ' in
the venerable city ' which, he writes from Samoa,
' I must always think of as my home.* Louis
was seldom in Edinburgh in summer. Swan-
ston was too attractive to him. In summer his
friends* canoes were launched on ' the Forth's
ample waters set with sacred isles,* and after a
day's sailing on the Firth they came home
browned with the sea air. Gretz started Steven-
son off on new journeyings. It suggested A7t
Inland Voyage, In Gretz, too, one autumn,
he had an experience which he never alluded to
in his constant autobiographic peeps which are
scattered through his pages. To the village on
the outskirts of the forest came a travelling player
and his wife, half conjurers and half actors, who
gave performances in Chevillon*s and the neigh-
bourhood. Louis Stevenson took one of his

278

EDINBURGH DAYS

enthusiastic fits over this man, who told him
tales, and assured his listener he was an Austrian
count in disguise, while his wife was a Bulgarian.
Louis came into the salon full of this romantic
tale, and was offended at it being suggested that
the conjurer was so well disguised no one could
possibly have guessed his identity. He became
enamoured of these charlatans, and took as a
personal insult the ready laugh of the salon when
a joker named the count and his wife the
* Bulgarian Atrocities/ Among the once-united
coterie at Gretz there had by then been sown
some dissension, so life did not run on such easy
lines as formerly. Louis hotly upheld the
authenticity of the Austrian count's pedigree.
He attended all his performances, applauding
loudly, walked, talked, and sat in Chevillon's
kitchen hobnobbing with the ably disguised
conjurer. There were people coming to Gretz
whom Louis wished to avoid, so he suddenly
announced his decision to accept an offer from
the Bulgarian Atrocities, and go a-touring with
them. The gipsy glamour of a roving life was
still unsatisfied by his other autumn travels.
Louis Stevenson, to use a Scotch phrase, * kept
a quiet sough ' on his experiences as a merry-
andrew. He was supposed by his people to be

379

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

among his artist friends, but when he returned
to Chevillon's he was, for him, marvellously
reticent on his adventures. All he admitted
was that he played before French yokel audiences
a part which was not of a high-class order —
the part of a stupid Englishman whose mistakes
in a foreign tongue were such as to appeal to
the galler>'. Only in the Mand Voyage did
Louis give a hint of his knowledge of people like
his disguised count. * I am pretty well ac-
quainted with the ways of French strollers, more
or less artistic,' he says ; and adds, * I have
found them singularly pleasant' but, unlike
his usual generosity in always sharing his
pleasures with the public, on this occasion he
kept them to himself.

For a delicate person Robert Louis took liber-
ties with his constitution which were suicidal.
Crossing the x^tlantic and then the Plains as
an emigrant brought him ver}^ near the grave,
in fact he never recovered from the effects of
these voyages ; but before these wretched experi-
ences he had faced winter and rough weather on
walking tours, and Modestine and he had not
good camping-out weather in the Cevennes.
This touring with mountebanks in France must
have been rash for one so sickly as he, with no

2S0

EDINBURGH DAYS

British grey-suited comrade in his wake with

pockets adequately Hned, to take him out of the

clutches of gendarmes and see that he had

decent meals and accommodation. If the scheme

of the barge had not failed for want of funds, it

would have been an ideal life for the migratory

author. W^liile thus yachting on land, as it

were, there would always have been calm waters

to traverse, no monotony as on the houseless

ocean, many glimpses of happy home life as he

glided past : such anonymous blessings as he

describes as the Arethusa, * when ideas came

and went like motes in a sunbeam, when trees

and church spires along the banks surged up

from time to time in my notice, like solid objects

through a rolling cloud-land. Indeed, it lies so

far from beaten paths of language that I despair

of getting the reader into the smiHng, complaisant

idiotcy of my condition.*

The thirst to travel simply for the sake of

moving, which Stevenson says assailed him,

would have been assuaged. In a barge Louis

could have had his home comforts, his books,

his desk, about him, and thus journeyed with

what Bailie Nicol Jarvie would have classed

as * a' the comforts o' the Saut Market,' through

the opulent lands bordering whatever watery

281

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

road he chose. If he had felt inchned to tarry
in any tempting spot, a site for his movable
house was always obtainable by the canal bank.
A mad Highland woman whom Louis met on
one of his knapsack wanderings, about 1870,
told him his fortune. ' All I could gather,' he
says, * may be thus summed up shortly : that I
was to visit America, that I was to be very happy,
and that I was to be much upon the sea — pre-
dictions which, in consideration of an uneasy
stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one
another.' * The pythoness was right,* he adds
in 1887. * I have been happy. I did go to
America (am going again, unless — ), and I
have been twice, and once upon the deep.' A
barge life would have saved the search for health
so far off on the Pacific where, instead of giving
way to the lotus-eating indolence of the ener\^at-
ing climate, he worked harder than ever he did
in the bracing North. Prophetically, at the end
of An Inland Voyage, he says : * Now we were
to return like the voyager in the play and see
what rearrangements fortune had perfected the
while in our surroundings, what surprises stood
ready-made for us at home, and whither and how
far the world had voyaged in our absence. You

may paddle all day long ; but it is when you
282

EDINBURGH DAYS

come back at nightfall, and look in at the
familiar room, that you find Love or Death
awaiting you beside the stove : and the most
beautiful adventures are not those we go to
seek.'

From this journey, with those ' fleet and
footless beasts of burthen,' the canoeists returned
to Gretz, and there by the stove sat Love await-
ing Robert Louis Stevenson. In The Wrecker
there is an American, Loudon Dodd, whose
father, seeing an opening for a man who could
turn out statues to embellish Muskegon State
public hall, orders his son to learn sculpture.
* I took up the statuary contract on our new
capitol ; I took it up first as a deal ; and then
it occurred to me it would be better to keep it
in the family. There is considerable money in
the thing, and it 's patriotic,' he explained to
Loudon, and to Paris Loudon went. The real
Loudon, one Mr. * Pardesous,' was in tnith
despatched to * learn to sculp ' for a hall in some
State which awaited his works of art. One small
statue of Freedom holding a banner was all he
accomplished after his studies. He knew the
artists and their haunt at Gretz, and in 1876
brought down there some ladies of his own

nation, who were also in Paris studying art.

283

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Pardesous was recommended by habitu6s to
take his compatriots to another hotel at Gretz.
But to Chevillon's there came Mrs. Osbourne,
her daughter Belle, and her son Sam, a lanky
little boy, for ever growing out of his clothes.
Sam was commonly known at Gretz as * Petit
feesh,' from the way he persistently spent his
time angling for the inhabitants of the river ;
and when asked by the Gretz boys what he was
catching, replied, ' Petit feesh.' These ' petit
feesh ' {Anglice, minnows) he spent much time
over, cooking them by the stove, and constantly
demanding a hairpin from his sister Belle as a
spit. Mrs. Osbourne's cloudy hair was upheld
by a piece of scarlet window-cord which con-
trasted well with its darkness. The Osbournes
had been in Paris a year or two. Both mother
and daughter were art students. Another son
of Mrs. Osbourne's — ' Herbie ' I think his name
was — had died in Paris, and his death had been
a great grief to her. The artist colony were not
best pleased by an American petticoat invasion.
As Stevenson says : ' Curious and not always
edifying are the shifts that the French student
uses to defend his lair ; like the cuttlefish, he
must sometimes blacken the waters of his

chosen pool ; but at such a time and for so
284

EDINBURGH DAYS

practical a purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow
him licence.'

However, the Osboumes had worked at Julien's
studio with many who were at Chevillon's, and
they were predisposed in their favour. Miss
Osboume had once gone to a Quartier Latin fancy
ball, given by an American, dressed as a nugget
of gold. The host at this dance was one who
appears in The Wrecker as Romney. He was
pathetically impecunious, older than most of his
fellows. ' I 'm poor, I 'm old, I 'm bald ! ' he
exclaimed one day in despair. He lived on fare
as spare as many a starving Scotch student, sub-
stituting potatoes for meal. Taureau's master
gave him the sabots the Luxembourg authorities
complained of as too noisy for their gallery.
Even at Siron's the precarious state of his
clothes was a subject of disquietude. Some
windfall had come his way, and so he decided
to have a junketing once in a way for his friends.
Great were the difficulties Miss Osbourne experi-
enced in removing the effects of the gilding next
day from her locks. Several barbers told her
that no washing would restore her hair to its
original colour ; soap and water only had the
effect of making it a sickly green. Sympathetic
partners accompanied her in her search for some-

2S5

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

thing to remove the tarnished shade from her
head, and at last a capable chemist supplied
a remedy. The Nugget of Gold had captivated
the hearts of several of the artists. Monsieur
Julien described his pupil as * a swabble of eyes
and teeth.' Her stepfather, speaking in rhyme of
her in Samoa, endorses this portrait in words : —

' Or see, as in a looking-glass,
Her pigmy, dimpled person pass.
Nought great therein but eyes and hair.'

Those who had known Miss Belle Osboume in
Paris in the winter sang her praises, and so over-
came the scruples of the others who complained
of the restraint the coming guests would inflict on
them, and all prepared to do their best to make
Chevillon's a fitting place for the Californians.

Returning to Gretz, Louis Stevenson was told
he was to take the end of the table near the new
arrivals, and guide and keep the conversation in
his vicinity in correct channels • so he, for once
not in search of adventures, walked in upon a
trio who for the rest of his life were to be his
fellow- voyagers. Louis filled the place of host
judiciously. The other men were well satisfied.
He devoted himself to the mother, and never
threatened to enter the lists against them for the
favour of the taking daughter of sweet seventeen.

?86

EDINBURGH DAYS

At first they thought Louis was amiably attaching
himself to Mrs. Osboume to give them fuller
opportunity to devote themselves to ' Belle,' and
were astonished to find his attentions to Mrs.
Osbourne were not disinterested. Louis never
seems to have hesitated in his allegiance. From
the evening he was elected to the host's chair,
and told to talk circumspectly to the newcomers,
he found Mrs. Osboume suited him. Although
he revelled in a tussle of arguments which
whetted his appetite for battle, he also enjoyed
having a sovereign sway, and an undisputed
uncontradicted flow to his conversation, when
he had a good listener. Mrs. Osboume smoked
with a soothing relish, looking out of her in-
scrutable eyes straight before her, sphinx-like
in her immovableness, but hearkening all the
while, and occasionally showing a flash of teeth
in such a rapid smile that some one said it was
like sheet lightning. It was, as Oliver Wendell
Holmes says, no case of copper against copper,
* but alien bloods develop strange currents when
they flow to each other.' Those who remember
these days at Gretz have recollections of aquatic
parties, half the day spent in bathing-dresses
on the river's edge, or boating on the Luon.
Then there were fits of industry after spells of

287

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

waterside loitering, and the artists tramped off
to their motifs. Mrs. Osbourne named one
7notif in true and terse but unpoetical American
language, 'The pinchbug fnotif,' for it was close
to an anthill. Louis acted as porter to her
belongings, undeterred by the ominous title
suggestive of midges or gadflies. A white um-
brella, a stool, an easel, and a pochard box was
the artist's kit. Louis bore Mrs. Osbourne's,
and some seeing the diminutive pictures of him
by Walter Crane in the frontispiece of Travels
with a Donkey in the Ccvennes, urging sly
Modes tine up the slope, past our Lady of the
Snows, till, silhouetted against the sunset, he is
preparing to disappear over the brow of the hill,
say it reminded them of him at these times.
He never looked his height (five feet ten inches)
owing to his stoop, or rather the forward bend of
his head ; and when walking alongside any one
he had a habit of going a step or two ahead and
looking back at his companion, which lessened
his appearance of height. As beast of burden
for the artist's kit, which was mostly strapped on
his back, he started forth jauntily, with Mrs.
Osbourne a few steps in the rear, his hands
keeping pace with his tongue, his shoulders,
which also gesticulated, loaded and heightened,

2§9

EDINBURGH DAYS

with his load. The others watched the couple,
laughing at their oppositeness in manner and
appearance,— Mrs. Osbourne, very short, with
her skirts neatly lifted, picking her way steadily,
but having to hurry at times to keep up with
her long and lean cavaher, who, flourishing his
eloquent hands, strode along at a rapid rate.

Robert Louis Stevenson had a toe-and-heel
preciseness in his walk, which suggested the
guinea fowl's undulating progress as he glided
along. Going and coming to Mrs. Osboume's
sketching-ground Louis led the way, talking as
volubly when returning as when he had started
out in the freshness of the morning. After the
Inland Voyage they did not, as of yore at
Chevillon's, sit and amuse themselves solely
by talk after the day was done. They clubbed
together, and invested in a piano, and danced
and sang. There were contests and prizes for
all manner of things besides the prize for draw-
ing, which had been fought for at Barbizon.
Mrs. Osbourne's recitation, in a consistently
dead-level voice, of ' George Washington and
the Pear Tree,' won honours for the most
monotonous stor>\ They kept a vocabulary,
written in charcoal on the white walls, of words
which were strange to some in their polyglot

T

289

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

assemblage, many being from across the Atlantic.
* Murka ' headed the list.

For a couple of years, spring and autumn,
from 1876 to 1878, much the same company
met at Gretz. The last season there was dis-
union amongst them, silence and glum looks in
the salon instead of jest and badinage. Meals
were taken at different times, and the good old
comradeship disappeared. Louis, who had still
his boyish love of marshalling puppets on the
stage, whether they were paper or flesh and
blood ones, tried to drill his artist friends into
the places the comedy or drama of their life
demanded. There was a talk of a duel, and
Louis was eager to have it orthodoxly staged.
Miss Osbourne's eyes had led to this romantic
climax. Louis was to second one swain. He
called a meeting of the community to arrange
correctly for every detail. One who had a
drolly humorous way of looking on the most
serious side of everything, proposed firstly that
the mutual piano, which they had subscribed for
in piping times of peace, should be sold to a rival
inn, and pistols and a pick be bought with the
proceeds, to enable them (as they were all out of
funds) to fight the duel, and then to bury the

one who fell, * far in the forest shade.' This
290

EDINBURGH DAYS

plan evoked laughter, at which the earnest
Louis was sorely annoyed. He hated ridicule
when he was engaged on any * make-believe,'
and the chance of a real live duel, about a lady
fair too, was not likely to come in his way again
in this unromantic centur}'. The would-be
duellists' weapons were not forthcoming. One
pistol, rusty and incompetent, existed. There
was no money to buy more ; but the piano was
not sold, and the duelling fever died out.

Meanwhile the centur>^ was growing beyond
its seventies, and before it reached its eighth
decade Louis Stevenson's road had diverged
widely from the path of those who knew him
in his Edinburgh days. He went off Across
the Plains to the magnet which drew him to a
far countr>\ The barriers to his marriage with
Mrs. Osboume were removed by a divorce, and
he married her in San Francisco, and became
for a space a ' Silverado Squatter.' He only
returned on brief visits to Edinburgh. He tried
a summer or two in Scotland, one up in the clear
northland air at Braemar, where, to amuse Sam
Osbourne, he began Treasure Island.

In 1 88 1 he became a candidate for the Chair
of Constitutional Law and Histor\^ in Edinburgh
University', for it was the one post in his Alma

291

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S

Mater for which he felt himself fitted. His
parents were anxious to have him near them,
and the earnings by his pen were very small,
not enough to support his delicate self and his
wife and son. He could again truly say, * It
was a comfortable thought to me that I had a
father.' His chance of success was small,
although the retiring Professor, Sheriff ^neas
Mackay, urged him to stand. His fame was
only dawning then. His father's luncheon Bibles
and his popular Jekyl and Hyde were about his
only published volumes. To Law he had paid
no court. He had shown to the public no interest
in history, he had not then even written a
footnote. Maybe, as he was one of the weak
ones the vicious climate had not killed in infancy,
he might have lived the longer in his weather-
beaten but healthful City of the Winds, if he
had been appointed. There is an amusing
sketch by his step-daugjiter, Belle (then Mrs.
Strong), of Louis teaching history to her small
son, Austin. Mrs. Stevenson, senior, when in
Samoa, took the boy's education into her hands,
and told him to remember not many were
schooled by so antique a relative as their great-
grandmother. Louis gave him history lectures.

Mrs. Strong has portrayed Austin, his hair on
292

EDINBURGH DAYS

end, his hands clutching his knees for support,
and leaning as far back as the wall allows, while
his historian's back is only seen, his arms up-
lifted, his thin fingers stretched out. One can
somehow see by the reflection of his tale on
Austin's face that it is a gruesome and a bloody
story, such as Scotch history supplies freely.
Though R. L. S. became only a history lecturer
to his household, he evidently was a fearsomely
eloquent one.

Louis tried to find health at Davos and Hy^res,
but finally built a house at Bournemouth, with
the name of a strong tower on its lintel, Skerry-
vore. Then the gipsy glamour came over him
once more, and he roved further afield. In 1887
he tried Saranac, and later began his Pacific
voyaging, which ended in his settling among the
engaging barbarism of Samoa. In 1881, when
he was at Pitlochrie, he wrote to me, apologizing
for not doing so sooner, ' for I have been steadily
travelling, and that tires me shockingly nowa-
days.' I was on the eve of an Antipodean trip,
and in a postscript he says, * It seems a long
way to go. Remember me to New Zealand when
you see it.' This little jest at the end was like
him, a flicker of nonsense ; for he little thought
then that Brighter Britain and he were to be

293

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

neighbours. His health for a while seemed
restored in the far-off South, but he overwrought
at his mastered vocation. * On one of the
hottest days I have ever known in Samoa,' said
Mr. Bazett Haggard, who had been at VaiHma
on the 3rd December 1894, * Stevenson was
continuously at work.' This strenuous energy
in one highly strung and never robust had the
fatal termination which was inevitable. Louis
had hoped and prayed his end, when it came,
would be mercifully swift. Even his desire to
die in his boots was granted to him. With no
great shadow to darken his path he had, as he
said of his father, ' a happy life ; nor was he
less fortunate in his death, which, at the last,
came to him unaware.' His right hand, we
know by the strength with which he drew Weir
of Herniiston, never lost its cunning, nor ever
did he forget thee, Auld Reekie !

When the voice of love fell, toneless, on his
closing ears, perchance it was granted him to
hear once more

* The old cry of the wind
In our inclement city ? '

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
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